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

Evolution of early male-killing in horizontally transmitted parasites

Early male-killing (MK) bacteria are vertically transmitted reproductive parasites which kill male offspring that inherit them. Whereas their incidence is well documented, characteristics allowing originally non-MK bacteria to gradually evolve MK ability remain unclear. We show that horizontal transmission is a mechanism enabling vertically transmitted bacteria to evolve fully efficient MK under a wide range of host and parasite characteristics, especially when the efficacy of vertical transmission is high. We also show that an almost 100% vertically transmitted and 100% effective male-killer may evolve from a purely horizontally transmitted non-MK ancestor, and that a 100% efficient male-killer can form a stable coexistence only with a non-MK bacterial strain. Our findings are in line with the empirical evidence on current MK bacteria, explain their high efficacy in killing infected male embryos and their variability within and across insect taxa, and suggest that they may have evolved independently in phylogenetically distinct species

Backscattering/transmission of 2 MeV He++ ions quantitative correlation study

In this work we report on detailed findings of planar channeling oscillations of 2 MeV He++ particles in (1 1 0) silicon crystal. The exact correlation and coherence mechanism between confined particles oscillating trajectories are analyzed theoretically and experimentally in backscattering/transmission geometry. Regular patterns of channeled He++ ion planar oscillations are shown to be dominated by the crystal harmonic-oscillator potential and multiple scattering effect. For the first time it was shown that under the planar channeling conditions trajectories of positively charged particles exhibit observable correlation dynamics, including the interference effect. Quantitative estimation of channeling efficiency is performed using path integral method. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.6th International Conference Channeling: Charged and Neutral Particles Channeling Phenomena, Oct 05-10, 2014, Capri, Ital

Characterization of La-Doped TiO2TiO_2 Nanopowders by Raman Spectroscopy

Titanium dioxide $(TiO_2)$ nanopowders doped with 0.65, 1, 2, 3 and 4 wt.% of lanthanum ions $(La^{3+})$ were synthesized by sol-gel technology. Dependence of structural and morphological characteristics of nanopowders on $La^{3+}$ content and synthesis conditions is investigated by the Raman spectroscopy. Very intensive modes observed in the Raman spectra of all nanopowder samples are assigned to anatase phase of $TiO_2$. Additional Raman modes of extremely low intensity can be related to the presence of certain amount of highly disordered brookite phase in nanopowders. Dependence of the intensity ratio of the Raman modes which originate from anatase and brookite on doping conditions is specially analyzed. In order to estimate the variation of nanocrystallite size with dopant content, shift and asymmetrical broadening of the most intensive $E_g$ Raman mode of anatase are analyzed by phonon confinement model. The obtained results are compared with the results of X-ray diffraction spectroscopy. Special attention is dedicated to the changes in the Raman spectra of pure and La-doped $TiO_2$ nanopowders observed after high temperature treatment

Identification of Reality in Bayesian Context

Complexity has many facets as does any general concept. The relationship between "infinitely" complex reality and restricted complexity of the artificial world of models is addressed. Particularly, the paper tries to clarify the meaning of Bayesian identification under mismodelling by answering the question, "What is the outcome of the Bayesian identification without supposing the model set considered contains the "true" system model?" The answer relates known asympotic results to the "natural" finite-time domain of Bayesian paradigm. It serves as an interpretation "smoother" of those Bayesian identification results that quietly ignore the mismodelling present. Keywords: decision-making, model selection, Bayesian identification, approximation 1 Introduction System identification can be understood as the set of procedures which model an investigated part of reality (called object, process, plant or system) using data measured on it [8]. Modelling of the reality, often informal, is a n..