Access Regulation and the Timing of Infrastructure Investment

This paper examines infrastructure investment incentives under a system of 'regulation by negotiation'. We demonstrate that an appropriately specified access pricing rule can induce private firms to choose to invest at a socially optimal time. The optimal regulatory regime allocates investment costs to the access provider and seeker based on their relative use-values of the facility. It is superior to an unregulated environment because it commits firms ex ante to an access charge that allows for sunk cost recovery. In addition, we show that when the time that access is sought is flexible both replacement- and historical-cost asset valuation methodologies can lead to optimal investment incentives. However, when seeker timing is restricted, historical cost can give rise to distorted incentives.     

RETAIL PRICE REGULATION AND THE OPTION TO DELAY

ABSTRACT ** :  This paper examines a two-period model of an investment decision in a network industry characterized by demand uncertainty, economies of scale and sunk costs. In the absence of regulation we identify the market conditions under which a monopolist decides to invest early as well as the underlying overall welfare output. In a regulated environment, we consider a monopolist who faces no downstream (final good) competition but is subject to retail price regulation. We identify the welfare-maximizing regulated prices when the unregulated market outcome is set as the benchmark. We show that if the regulator can commit to ex post regulation – that is, regulated prices that are contingent to future demand realization – then regulated prices that allow the firm to recover its total costs of production are welfare-maximizing. Thus, under ex post price regulation there is no need to compensate the regulated firm for the option to delay that it foregoes when investing today. We argue, however, that regulators cannot make this type of commitment and, therefore, price regulation is often ex ante – that is, regulated prices are not contingent to future demand. We show that the optimal ex ante regulation, and the extent to which regulated prices need to incorporate an option to delay, depend on the nature of demand uncertainty.     

Access Pricing under Rate-of-Return Regulation

Third-party access to major infrastructure facilities is a key component of National Competition Policy. In many situations, both through state regimes and access undertakings under the new part IIIA of the Trade Practices Act, access will be governed by explicit or implicit rate-of-return procedures. Infrastructure assets will be valued and translated into an allowable return for the owners. However, setting allowed returns is only the first part of the regulatory process. This paper uses a simple model to evaluate the 'second-best' access prices under rate-of-return regulation. We show that optimal access prices will depend on the degree of downstream competition. With imperfect price competition and fixed numbers of firms downstream, optimal access prices will 'mimic' downstream competition and reduce downstream profits. With free entry downstream, optimal access pricing should determine an optimal level of downstream participation. We also show that the access provider's incentives to introduce optimal access prices will depend on the degree of vertical integration.     

Regulation of network infrastructure investments: an experimental evaluation

This paper reports the results of an experiment evaluating three regulatory schemes for network infrastructure, in terms of their ability to generate efficient levels of capacity investment. We compare the performance of (1) price cap regulation, (2) a regulatory holiday for new capacity, and (3) price cap regulation with long term contracts combined with a secondary market. The setting is one in which network users can benefit from acting strategically, and are better informed than the network operator about demand growth. We find that the regulatory holiday creates an incentive to underinvest relative to optimal levels. Long term contracts also fail to improve on single price-cap regulation, and may reduce investment by providing noisier signals about future demand.     

Entry, Prices, and Investment in Regulated Industries

The paper studies how the optimal regulatory policy is affected by the possibility of unregulated firms entering the market. In such cases, the regulator may prefer to limit price and cost reductions in the regulated incumbent. The extent to which this happens is shown to depend on the extent of the regulator's commitment: if it commits to a chosen policy, then the market outcome following entry is less competitive than it would be without commitment: price and production costs are both higher. We also show that, unlike the natural monopoly case, incentives for cost reducing investment are stronger when the regulatory policy has a short regulatory interval.     

Options for Electricity Transmission Regulation in Australia

The pricing of access to electricity transmission networks in Australia is currently under review. Several options have been proposed including those based on nodal pricing and the assignment of transmission rights contracts. As most of the marginal costs of transmission are recovered through wholesale electricity prices we focus on the key issue of regulation and investment incentives. We find that current options are unlikely to be adequate in terms of encouraging socially optimal levels and timing of new transmission investment. As an alternative, we propose a regulatory scheme, based on a related idea by Sappington and Sibley that can overcome this problem. Our scheme can potentially generate first best results and is readily applicable given the current institutional structure of electricity markets in Australia.     

Platform competition and seller investment incentives

Many products and services are not sold on open platforms but on competing for-profit platforms, which charge buyers and sellers for access. What is the effect of for-profit intermediation on seller investment incentives? Since for-profit intermediaries reduce the available rents in the market, one might naively suspect that sellers have weaker investment incentives with competing for-profit platforms. However, we show that for-profit intermediation may lead to overinvestment when free access would lead to underinvestment because investment decisions affect the strength of indirect network effects and, thus, access prices. We characterize the effect of for-profit intermediation on investment incentives depending on the nature of the investment and on which side of the market singlehomes.     

Transaction costs and the property rights approach to the theory of the firm

The standard property rights approach is focused on ex ante investment incentives, while there are no transaction costs that might restrain ex post negotiations. We explore the implications of such transaction costs. Prominent conclusions of the property rights theory may be overturned: A party may have stronger investment incentives when a non-investing party is the owner, and joint ownership can be the uniquely optimal ownership structure. Intuitively, an ownership structure that is unattractive in the standard model may now be desirable, because it implies large gains from trade, such that the parties are more inclined to incur the transaction costs.     

Mixed up? that’s good for motivation

We show that career concerns can arise in the absence of ex ante uncertainty about an agent’s type, if his unobservable actions influence future productivity. Implementing effort in mixed strategies allows the principal to endogenously introduce uncertainty about the agent’s ex post productivity and generate reputational incentives. Creating such ambiguity can be optimal for the principal, even though this exposes the agent to additional risk and reduces output. This finding for an environment with imperfect commitment contrasts with standard agency models, where implementing mixed strategy actions typically is not optimal if pure strategies can also be implemented.     

Strategic Regulation Policy in the Internet

Some countries are importers while others are exporters of global backbone connectivity. At the same time, input components such as local access are non-traded. This paper analyzes a non-cooperative regulatory game between importing and exporting countries, assuming that the prices of both traded and non-traded inputs can be regulated. We show that exporting countries choose a more restrictive regulation of non-traded goods than importing countries do. We further show that a requirement of international non-discrimination may hurt importing countries, and give firms producing traded inputs incentives to invest in quality degradation.     

Barriers to network-specific investment

We examine incentives for network-specific investment and consider the implications for network governance. We model a two-sided market in which participants making payments over a network platform can invest in a technology that reduces the marginal cost of using the platform. A network effect results in multiple equilibria—either all agents invest and use of the platform is high or no agents invest and use of the platform is low. The high-use equilibrium can be implemented if commitment is feasible. When the platform cannot commit to usage fees, investment in the platform-specific technology will be held up, thus implementing the low-investment equilibrium. As a result, governance structures necessary to achieve commitment will be preferred to those necessary merely to achieve coordination. For example, mutual ownership by users of a network platform may emerge where users face risk of ex post renegotiation. Such a governance structure will also be sufficient to avoid low investment attributable to the network effect.     

Separation of Regulatory Powers When Contracts Are Incomplete

The investment of a regulated firm affects the service/good provided on many dimensions. Should an integrated regulator take care of them all? Or is it better to have separate regulators responsible for them? We analyze the effect of the separation of regulatory powers on the regulated firm's ex ante incentive to invest in a “cooperative” innovation. The effects of the innovation are not verifiable and the cost of investing is sunk, hence, there is a problem of hold‐up. We find that when the innovation produces opposite effects the ex ante firm's incentive to invest is larger in the case of separation than in the case of integrated regulation. We also stress the risk of over‐investment that the separation of regulatory powers may induce. We maintain that along with classical incentive regulation—which mainly provides incentives for the firm to be efficient—the separation of regulatory powers may play a role in providing an incentive for cooperative innovations.     

Pricing flexibility under rate-of-return regulation: Effects on network infrastructure investment

When a commodity market relies upon a regulated network service industry—e.g., telecommunications, electricity, or natural gas transmission—economic efficiency in that commodity market is a crucial consideration for regulatory design. This is because insufficient infrastructure investment relative to network demand results in congestion. The extraction of associated rents has distortionary effects on commodity spot market prices. Greater regulatory flexibility in network pricing can alleviate such issues by cultivating the incentives needed for stakeholders to invest in transmission capacity. To illustrate this effect I derive and numerically solve stylized optimality conditions for access and usage prices for a gas pipeline operator under alternative regulatory models. My results have general implications for regulation in network infrastructure industries, as energy and telecommunications markets are expected to expand considerably over the coming decades.     

Level of access and infrastructure investment in network industries

In this paper, we study how the terms of access to an incumbent’s infrastructure (i.e., the level of access and price) affect an entrant’s incentives to build its own infrastructure. Setting a high level of access (e.g., a resale arrangement), which requires relatively small up-front investment for entry, accelerates market entry, but at the same time delays the deployment of the entrant’s infrastructure. This is also true for a lower access price. We show that the socially optimal access price can vary non-monotonically with the level of access. We also study the case where access is provided at two different levels, and show that access provision at multiple levels can delay infrastructure building. Finally, we modify our baseline model to allow for experience and/or market share acquisition via access-based entry, and show that high levels of access may accelerate facility-based entry.     

Regulatory design and incentives for renewable energy

Increasing electric power production from renewable energy sources is currently one of the major objectives of energy policy. The intermittent nature of renewables, such as wind and solar, necessarily imposes complex trade-offs for regulatory objectives, such as resource adequacy (and system reliability) versus reductions in green house gas emissions. We develop a highly stylized model of investments in order to derive insights regarding the workings of regulatory incentives for increased renewable energy. We first show that incentives are indeed needed when there are significant economies of scale in the form of “learning by doing” or alternatively, when there is excess capacity in conventional technology due to legacy investments. We analyze two different regulatory schemes (feed-in tariffs and renewable portafolio standards) aimed at increasing investment in renewable capacity. We show that neither scheme is capable of inducing the socially optimal level of investment in renewable capacity. A single feed-in tariff fails to induce optimal investment as a feed-in tariff exceeding marginal costs of conventional technology incentivizes over-development of the most attractive sites which preempts investment in less attractive, yet socially valuable sites. A renewable portfolio standard that promotes increased investment in renewable technology induces under-investment in the conventional technology. These results suggest that a “clinical” regulatory design, that is, one that promotes the right amount of renewable capacity without affecting conventional capacity is a challenging proposition.     

A note on trade liberalization and common pool resources

Abstract.  When countries share access to a common resource stock, optimal management is based on strategic considerations. We develop a general equilibrium model and show that regulatory policies are strategic substitutes under autarky. Trade liberalization not only changes relative prices, but may change the qualitative nature of the game between jurisdictions. In the small country case with exogenous prices, regulatory policies become strategic complements. In the context of a two‐country model, policies remain strategic substitutes but the factors that drive policy changes differ from those under autarky and the small country case. The implications for conservation and resource management are discussed.     

Ordinary Shares and Managers

We argue that ordinary shares undermine any inherent commitment of its holders to resist renegotiating away ex post inefficiencies. Yet, in a dynamic adverse selection problem, such ex post inefficiencies are optimal from an ex ante point of view. We show that shareholders may use a manager in combination with a golden parachute (managerial severance payments) as a commitment device not to renegotiate ex post.     

Public versus private ownership: Quantity contracts and the allocation of investment tasks

The government wants a certain good or service to be provided. Should the required assets be publicly or privately owned or should a partnership be formed? Building on the incomplete contracting approach, we argue that the initially specified quantity of an ex ante describable basic good can have important effects on investment incentives, which has been neglected in the literature so far. We also study how the tasks of investing in quality improvements and cost reductions should be assigned. We show how the optimal contracts and governance structures depend on the exogenous parameters of the model such as the nature of the investments and the parties' bargaining powers.     

Information Provision in Procurement Auctions

We study the optimal provision of information in a procurement auction with horizontally differentiated goods. The buyer has private information about her preferred location on the product space and has access to a costless communication device. A seller who pays the entry cost may submit a bid comprising a location and a minimum price. We characterize the optimal information structure and show that the buyer prefers to attract only two bids. Further, additional sellers are inefficient since they reduce total and consumer surplus, gross of entry costs. We show that the buyer will not find it optimal to send public information to all sellers. On the other hand, she may profit from setting a minimum price and that a severe hold‐up problem arises if she lacks commitment to set up the rules of the auction ex ante.     

The public management of risk: Separating ex ante and ex post monitors

When a firm undertakes risky activities, the conflict between social and private incentives to implement safety care requires public intervention which can take the form of both monetary incentives and also ex ante or ex post monitoring, i.e., before or after an accident occurs. We delineate the optimal scope of monitoring depending on whether public monitors are benevolent or corruptible. We show that separating the ex ante and the ex post monitors increases the likelihood of ex post investigation, helps prevent capture and improves welfare.