Access Pricing : Theory and Practice

Access to essential facilities or so-called bottlenecks has become the key public policy issue for the liberalization of network industries such as telecommunications, electricity, rail and so on. Still, access prices are not only important for competition in formerly monopolistic industries, but also for industries where competition has long been established such as payment and credit card networks or mobile telecommunications. As the latter industries have also come under closer scrutiny by regulatory agencies and competition authorities, this book is dedicated to the analysis of access pricing in theory and practice. The structure of this book which is organized in five parts is as follows: The extended introduction will introduce the key concepts and issues including a brief explanation of the essential facility concept as well as the distinction between one-way and two-way access and will briefly survey the main contributions within the literature on access pricing theory and practice. While parts I and II deal with the theory of one-way and two-way access pricing, respectively, part III focuses on the newly emerging theory of access pricing with multihoming. Parts IV and V address the practice side and focus on industry-specific applications and special problems (Part IV) as well as public policy issues (Part V). This book provides valuable theoretical and empirical analyses in Access Pricing and related topics. It offers several different points of view. It features research from highly reputed scientists working in this field.