Abstract
The provision of access and its pricing have been extensively studied for a variety of network industries, including the telecommunications and energy sectors.1 It has received less attention in the postal economics literature. While there exist some studies (see e.g., (1995, 1997)) and, more recently, Crew and Kleindorfer (2002)) a number of issues remain open or have received only partial solutions. On the policy side, however, the appropriate pricing of access appears to occupy a prominent role in the current regulatory debate. Consequently, an in depth study of the underlying issues is of crucial importance. In particular, there is a need for simple and intuitive pricing rules which though possibly relying on restrictive assumptions may provide the required qualitative arguments in the debate. Our aim is to move forward in that direction. To do so, we consider a setting which is sufficiently simple to keep the analysis tractable while capturing some essential stylized facts from the postal sector. We would like to thank Philippe De Donder for his insightful comments and suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of La Poste.
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de Villemeur, E.B., Cremer, H., Roy, B., Toledano, J. (2003). Access and (Non-)Uniform Pricing in the Postal Sector. In: Crew, M.A., Kleindorfer, P.R. (eds) Competitive Transformation of the Postal and Delivery Sector. Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy Series, vol 46. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8915-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8915-4_2
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