375 research outputs found
Geographic Regulation and Cooperative Investment in Next Generation Broadband Networks - A Review of Recent Literature and Practical Cases
The smart grid as commons: exploring alternatives to infrastructure financialisation
This paper explores a tension between financialisation of electricity infrastructures and efforts to bring critical urban systems into common ownership. Focusing on the emerging landscape of electricity regulation and e-mobility in the United Kingdom (UK), it examines how electricity grid ownership has become financialised, and why the economic assumptions that enabled this financialisation are being called into question. New technologies, such as smart electricity meters and electric vehicles, provide cities with new tools to tackle poor air quality and greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity grids are key enabling infrastructures but the companies that run them do not get rewarded for improving air quality or tackling climate change. UK government regulation of electricity grids both enables financialisation and forecloses opportunities to manage the infrastructure for wider environmental and public benefit. Nonetheless, the addition of smart devices to this network - the ‘smart grid’ – opens up an opportunity for common ownership of the infrastructure. Transforming the smart grid into commons necessitates deep structural reform to the entire architecture of infrastructure regulation in the UK
Speeding Up the Internet: Regulation and Investment in European Fiber Optic Infrastructure
An empirical analysis of countervailing power in business-to-business bargaining
Pricing schemes in business-to-business (B2B) relationships reflect price discrimination and bargaining over rents. Bargaining outcomes are determined by upstream market power and countervailing buyer power downstream. This paper uses an exceptional panel of B2B transactions in the UK brick market to study B2B transaction prices. The empirical analysis identifies three effects on prices: nonlinear volume and freight absorption effects; countervailing power effects arising from buyers' local commercial significance; and competition effects due to the buyers' local potential suppliers. And it shows that small buyers benefit more from competition than large buyers because they are not constrained by the suppliers' capacity
Knowing is trusting? An experimental test of the role of information in advisory
The recent economic crisis still lingering in Europe has deeply affected the way individuals look at the investment market. Understanding the trust processes underlying the decision to invest with financial intermediaries is of particular importance both at managerial (product development and advertisement) and at normative level (how intermediaries are regulated). Using an online experiment, this paper investigates whether discrepancies in the financial literacy of investors and brokers can be used to explain the decision to trust – thus, to invest in the financial market. The results show that trust is affected by the information disclosure in somewhat unexpected ways
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