Impact of local competition and regulation on deployment of advanced telecommunications services for businesses

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2003.Leaf 110 blank.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-107).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.After a decade of development, advanced telecommunications services (ATS) are widely available in many markets. This thesis is concerned with the impact of local competition and government regulation on the deployment of advanced telecommunications services for business in the United States. These services include packet switching, digital signal level (DS) technologies and synchronous optical network (SONET) – optical carrier (OC) transport. Increasingly, businesses are using these services for intra and extra network communications. Access to advanced telecommunication services is important for economic development. Government policy makers are interested in identifying what steps can be taken to accelerate the roll-out of services in their communities. Business and corporate users are often interested in services that are different from what the residential customers desire. This thesis focuses on a broader range of advanced services of interest to the business customers than most empirical research to date. It also provides a better and more insightful metric at a finer level of granularity to address these questions. The impacts of local business conditions, rivalry and regulations on the deployment of advanced telecommunication services are analyzed by means of econometric analysis. A rich data set has been constructed which identifies the competitive, regulatory and economic climates at each incumbent’s wire center in the United States. A qualitative response model is used to estimate how business characteristics of the communities and their regulatory environments affect the deployment of ATS. I conclude that local competition, federal subsidies, 271 approval, and high unbundled network element (UNE) price to book cost ratio have positive impacts on advanced telecommunication services deployment, while federal price cap regulation and location in a rural area have negative impacts. These findings have significant implications on government regulatory policies. The thesis recommends regulatory policies, which focus on services, such as rate-based rate-of-return regulation over price caps and encourages competitors’ entry, facilities-based competition and federal support to accelerate deployment of advanced telecommunications services. It concludes by encouraging governments and organizations to support more research, experimentation and better data collection to increase understanding of underlying socio-economic and regulatory factors affecting deployment of advanced telecommunications services.by Guang-Lih Huang.S.M

Impact of intellectual property rights on scientific knowledge diffusion, accumulation and utilization

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2006.Includes bibliographical references.The impact of intellectual property rights on the production, diffusion and accumulation of scientific knowledge has been a central concern of public policymakers and economists in both public and private institutions, and scholars in management economics and sociology. In this dissertation, I examine the central patenting debates over the role of patenting the life sciences and address a set of interrelated questions: (1) the impact of strategic intellectual property policies of institutions on their cumulative knowledge dissemination, utilization and commercialization; (2) the unique attributes of life science innovations captured by patents generated under different institutional settings; and (3) the degree to which patenting activities impact the rate and trajectories of scientific knowledge accumulation under varying intellectual property conditions. I take as my research setting, the Human Genome Project (HGP) and our mapping of the entire human genome that emerged from the project (as defined in both scientific publications and patents). The HGP was a 13-year, $3.8 billion research effort funded and coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health, and one of the most significant life science research projects ever undertaken.(cont.) To address the first question, I study the seven key genome centers in the HGP, which produced almost all the genome sequence output and provide an unusually matched and well-controlled natural experiment to examine the impact of different knowledge institutions on the subsequent diffusion of scientific knowledge. To explore the second question, I build on the data set of the population of 4270 gene patents to systematically quantify and analyze the important attributes of these gene-based innovations. Through the construction of a set of validated measures, I specifically characterize the variation in these innovations when made under public versus private institutional settings and compare them to the innovations across broad technology fields from previous studies. To answer the third question, I identify and construct a large-scale, novel data set of 1279 unique patent-paper pairs from the gene patents and apply econometric models to shed light on the degree to which patent grant in the life sciences impacts the rate of follow-on scientific research. I find that publications with matched patent pairs are associated with higher citations on the average. Since only an institutional policy allowing patents results in patents, such policy does not stifle cumulative knowledge dissemination and use. In addition, patents contribute to technological innovation, commercialization and start-up.(cont.) Furthermore, I identified a growing convergence of public/academic and industry innovations in the life sciences especially in terms of their "basicness" and appropriability as characterized by the Pasteur's quadrant, and that variation in institutional setting is associated with differential innovation characteristics. I also find evidence of "technological trajectories", coherence and persistence across various attributes of life science innovations. However, I determine that gene patenting impedes temporal knowledge diffusion and use and decreases citations of paired publications once they are granted and become "visible" to the public, as predicted by the anti-commons effect. I also ascertain that patenting hinders knowledge diffusion and use to a greater degree on private sector authored publications than public ones and for U.S. authored than non-U.S. authored ones, and that corporate patenting has a more adverse impact than public institution patenting. As the first study of its kind to directly test the "patent thicket" conceptualization, I find direct statistical evidence of the adverse effect of "patent thickets" and that the patenting of disease and cancer genes negatively impacts knowledge dissemination and use by follow-on scientists and researchers.by Kenneth Guang-Lih Huang.Ph.D

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition)

In 2008 we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, research on this topic has continued to accelerate, and many new scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Accordingly, it is important to update these guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Various reviews have described the range of assays that have been used for this purpose. Nevertheless, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to measure autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. For example, a key point that needs to be emphasized is that there is a difference between measurements that monitor the numbers or volume of autophagic elements (e.g., autophagosomes or autolysosomes) at any stage of the autophagic process versus those that measure fl ux through the autophagy pathway (i.e., the complete process including the amount and rate of cargo sequestered and degraded). In particular, a block in macroautophagy that results in autophagosome accumulation must be differentiated from stimuli that increase autophagic activity, defi ned as increased autophagy induction coupled with increased delivery to, and degradation within, lysosomes (inmost higher eukaryotes and some protists such as Dictyostelium ) or the vacuole (in plants and fungi). In other words, it is especially important that investigators new to the fi eld understand that the appearance of more autophagosomes does not necessarily equate with more autophagy. In fact, in many cases, autophagosomes accumulate because of a block in trafficking to lysosomes without a concomitant change in autophagosome biogenesis, whereas an increase in autolysosomes may reflect a reduction in degradative activity. It is worth emphasizing here that lysosomal digestion is a stage of autophagy and evaluating its competence is a crucial part of the evaluation of autophagic flux, or complete autophagy. Here, we present a set of guidelines for the selection and interpretation of methods for use by investigators who aim to examine macroautophagy and related processes, as well as for reviewers who need to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of papers that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a formulaic set of rules, because the appropriate assays depend in part on the question being asked and the system being used. In addition, we emphasize that no individual assay is guaranteed to be the most appropriate one in every situation, and we strongly recommend the use of multiple assays to monitor autophagy. Along these lines, because of the potential for pleiotropic effects due to blocking autophagy through genetic manipulation it is imperative to delete or knock down more than one autophagy-related gene. In addition, some individual Atg proteins, or groups of proteins, are involved in other cellular pathways so not all Atg proteins can be used as a specific marker for an autophagic process. In these guidelines, we consider these various methods of assessing autophagy and what information can, or cannot, be obtained from them. Finally, by discussing the merits and limits of particular autophagy assays, we hope to encourage technical innovation in the field