Competition and Market Strategies in the Swiss Fixed Telephony Market. An estimation of Swisscom’s dynamic residual demand curve.

Fixed telephony has long been a fundamentally important market for European telecommunications operators. The liberalisation and the introduction of regulation in the end of the 1990s, however, allowed new entrants to compete with incumbents at the retail level. A rapid price decline and a decline in revenues followed. Increased retail competition consequently led a number of national regulators to deregulate this market. In 2013, however, many European countries (including Switzerland) continued to have partially binding retail price regulation. More than a decade after liberalisation and the introduction of wholesale and retail price regulation, sufficient data is available to empirically measure the success of regulation and assess its continued necessity. This paper develops a market model based on a generalised version of the traditional “dominant firm – competitive fringe” model allowing the incumbent also more competitive conduct than that of a dominant firm. A system of simultaneous equations is developed and direct estimation of the incumbent‟s residual demand function is performed by instrumenting the market price by incumbent-specific cost shifting variables as well as other variables. Unlike earlier papers that assess market power in this market, this paper also adjusts the market model to ensure a sufficient level of cointegration and avoid spurious regression results. This necessitates introducing intertemporal effects. While the incumbent's conduct cannot be directly estimated using this framework, the concrete estimates show that residual demand is inelastic (long run price elasticity of residual demand of -0.12). Such a level of elasticity is, however, only compatible with a profit maximising incumbent in the case of largely competitive conduct (conduct parameter below 0.12 and therefore close to zero). It is therefore found that the Swiss incumbent acted rather competitively in the fixed telephony retail market in the period under review (2004-2012) and that (partial) retail price caps in place can no longer be justified on the basis of a lack of competition

Fifteen years of research in innovative HVAC plants at DTG

At the Department of Management and Engineering (DTG) of the University of Padova (Italy), the research team led by Prof. Renato Lazzarin, formed by the au-thors, worked during the first fifteen years of the millennium on different topics fo-cused on innovative HVAC technologies. Both experimental and theoreti-cal/modelling studies were carried on: condensing boilers performances were eval-uated in different climates; a liquid desiccant system for the air conditioning of one of the DTG buildings, operating both in winter and in summer mode, was designed, realized and tested; a self-regenerating liquid desiccant cooling system able to de-humidify, heating or cooling the ambient air by an electric heat pump was installed in a new building of the Vicenza hospital, and a data logging system was set up to monitor several parameters; a Gas Engine Heat Pump plant for the air conditioning of another building of the DTG was designed, realized and monitored for a long pe-riod; a multi-source heat pump system for a school building was modelled and dy-namically simulated, and then designed and monitored; hybrid water/phase change materials tanks were modelled, designed and tested for thermal energy storage; fi-nally, thermal and electric solar cooling plants were modelled and dynamically simulated for evaluating energy performance. The paper summarizes the main ideas and results of the research during the fifteen years period of work together

Research in Sustainable Energy Systems at the Department of Management and Engineering during the First 15 Years of 2000

At the Department of Management and Engineering (DTG) of the University of Padova (Italy), the research team led by Prof. Renato Lazzarin, formed by the authors, worked during the first fifteen years of the millennium on different topics focused on sustainable technologies for energy production and utilization in buildings. Both experimental and theoretical/modeling studies were carried out, all sharing the evaluation of energy performance and sustainability: From the life cycle assessment and life cycle cost of building insulation materials in Italy, to the measurement of energy performance of a green roof, to the experimental measurement of different photovoltaic/thermal modules, to the development of a simulation software for direct and indirect evaporative cooling techniques, to the evaluation of different energy savings techniques for refrigeration and air conditioning in supermarkets, to an extensive analysis of the urban heat island effect in the city of Padova. The paper summarizes the main theoretical and experimental approaches, providing the methods adopted in each line of research. The main results of the studies conducted during the fifteen-year period are described and commented on, some of which were a well-established reference for the following literature