Competition in long-distance and telecommunications equipment markets: Effects of the MFJ

The Modification of Final Judgement (MJF) is now 10 years old. The MFJ was a historic change in US antitrust policy and in telecommunications policy. Pre-divestiture AT&T was divided into a single company, AT&T, which was allowed to compete in long-distance markets, telecommunications equipment markets and (with some delay) information service markets. Seven regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) were permitted to provide local service and nearby long-distance service. However, the BOCs were not permitted to enter the three markets reserved for AT&T. In 1991 the Information Services restriction was eliminated for the BOCs. However, the ban on provision of (interLATA) long distance and equipment remains. The policy experiment was quite interesting since no other nation has followed the USA, despite numerous other countries ending the formerly monopoly status of their telecommunications provider. In this paper I evaluate how competitive the remaining markets reserved for AT&T, and from which the BOCS are banned, have become. I conclude that (interLATA) long-distance market for residential and small business users, by far the largest fraction of users of long distance is currently uncompetitive. AT&Ts prices are constrained by FCC regulation, not by competition. AT&T has market power and is exercising market power. For equipment markets, I find a good deal more competition. However, I conclude that the BOCs could not impede competition in long distance and that removal of the MFJ restrictions would be pro-competitive. Thus, I conclude that removal of the MFJ estrictions on the BOCs would be pro-competitive, would increase economic efficiency, and would improve consumer welfare.     

Assessing the effects of divestiture on Bell telephone laboratories

Testimony in the antitrust suit filed by the U.S. government against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company included a number of predictions of the effects on Bell Telephone Laboratories of restructuring A T& T. This paper examines these predictions, analyzing the conceptual and theoretical basis for them, discussing their relevance to the operations of Bell Labs before divestiture, and analyzing the accuracy of the predictions with the limited evidence on the structure and performance of the Labs since divestiture in 1984. The modest performance of these predictions underlines the imperfect state of theoretical undcrstanding of the organization of research and innovation.     

The effect of enhanced competition on the equity values of the regional bell operating companies

Recent developments in the telecommunications industry have increased the likelihood that the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) will face new competition in the market for local telephone services. These developments include (1) regulatory decisions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to facilitate competitive entry or the application of new technologies (e.g. personal communications services) to the local communications market, and (2) strategic decisions by AT&T, MCI Communications, and Time-Warner to enter the local communications market. The entry of new firms is expected to reduce the cash flows of the RBOCs. Using the event study methodology, this paper examines the announcement effects of several of these developments on the values of the RBOCs. Collectively, the announcements are associated with a significant decline in the aggregate value of the RBOCs.     

Interview with Nancy Reid

Nancy Reid was born in September 1952 in Niagara Falls, Canada. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor in Mathematics and a major in Statistics in 1974. She pursued her training in Statistics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where she obtained a Master's in Applied Mathematics in 1976 and at Stanford University, where she graduated with a PhD in Statistics in 1979. After spending one year at Imperial College in London visiting Sir David Cox, she joined UBC as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, where she had an important role in the creation of the Department of Statistics. In 1986, she moved to the University of Toronto, where she has been since then as a faculty in the Department of Statistics. Nancy has served as Chair of the Department between 1997 and 2002. Nancy's research in conditional inference, higher order asymptotics and composite likelihood has been influential in Statistics. Her outstanding contributions to Statistics were recognized nationally and internationally with many awards, including the President's Award of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS), Gold Medal awarded by the Statistical Society of Canada and Elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. She received the Doctor of Mathematics, Honoris Causa, University of Waterloo. Nancy served with distinction as Editor of the Canadian Journal of Statistics and President of the Statistical Society of Canada and President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2014, she was appointed as Officer of the Order of Canada for her outstanding achievements, exemplary leadership and service to Canadians. The following conversation took place at the JSM 2016 in Chicago, on August 2 and 3, 2016.     

Forecasting competitive behavior: An assessment of AT&T's incentive to extend its U.S. network

Competitive analysis is used to forecast how, where and when AT&T will integrate backward into the production of its own local access. By using a net present value framework to model AT&T's decision on whether to create additional capacity for collecting and distributing its long-distance traffic, a realistic assessment of the scope and timing of such action is achieved. Thus, a technique outside the usual class of those used in U.S. telecommunications demand forecasting is applied. The effects of two local exchange company rate structures for switched access are compared. Revenue at risk to a local exchange company totaled approximately $267 million for rates in effect, as compared to $100 million under a flattened rate structure.     

Impact of Karl Pearson's Work on Statistical Developments in India

Karl Pearson's work greatly inspired P. C. Mahalanobis's interest in statistics, who was at the centre of modern statistical developments in India. Mahalanobis learned statistics on his own, reading Pearson's articles and his journal, and encouraged others to study Pearson's papers. Pearson was a Honorary Fellow of the Indian Statistical Institute, which has been a leading statistical training and research center in India. The statistical revolution that Pearson brought also facilitated the training and research of many Indian statisticians.     

Statistics Research at Bell Labs in the Regulated Monopoly Era

Industrial research in the United States took hold and grew during much of the 20th century. Bell Labs, a corporate component of the Bell System, was perhaps the premier example. The period from 1925, when Bell Labs was formed, to 1984, when the Bell System was broken up following a government antitrust lawsuit, is of special interest because the system operated as a regulated monopoly during that period. Telephone subscribers effectively paid for research and development in their monthly phone bills, which provided an element of financial stability for the labs. Statistics research was one of many types that thrived, much to the benefit of the Bell System, its customers, and the science of statistics. The purpose of this article is to review, explain, and illustrate the circumstances that contributed to this success and to raise the question of how modern corporations, operating in fully competitive environments, might achieve some of the same benefits.     

A Conversation with Roger Koenker

Roger William Koenker was born February 21, 1947. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1969 and obtained his PhD in Economics from University of Michigan in 1974 under the direction of Saul Hymans. He was Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign (UIUC) from 1974 to 1976, and a member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1976 to 1983 and returned to UIUC as Professor in 1983. He is currently a William B. McKinley Professor of Economics and Professor of Statistics at UIUC. He is best known for his seminal work on quantile regression, which has emerged as a powerful regression analysis tool across many disciplines. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Fellow of Econometric Society, and recipient of the 2010 Emanuel and Carol Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation. The conversation covers part of Roger Koenker's career as an econometrician and statistician, starting from his college years.     

Can managerial economics aid the chief executive officer?: 1st annual MDE lecture,Pace University,Graduate School of Business,New York City,USA

This paper contains the text of a speech given in New York in early 1981. Dr Beasley chose his topic for the occasion of the Annual Lecture sponsored by Managerial and Decision Economics. The lecture was attended by academics and businessmen from the American East Coast Future lectures will be held in different locations. Managerial and Decision Economics is delighted to have had a man of Dr Beasley's stature to present this, the Inaugural Lecture of the series. We believe readers will find it both helpful and unconventionally provocative.     

A Conversation with James O. Ramsay

Jim Ramsay was born on September 5, 1942, in Prince George, British Columbia. He pursued undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta, where he completed a BEd in 1964 with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. He then specialized in statistics and psychometry, earning a PhD in psychology from Princeton University in 1966. After holding a temporary lectureship in the Department of Psychology at University College London for one year, he joined the Department of Psychology at McGill University, where he rose through the academic ranks. He was chair of his department from 1986 to 1989 and spent sabbatical leaves in Cambridge, Grenoble, and Toulouse. He was named professor emeritus upon his retirement in 2007. Jim is the author of four influential books and over 100 peer‐reviewed articles in statistical and psychometric journals. He developed much of the statistical theory behind multidimensional scaling and is widely recognized as the founder of functional data analysis. Three of his papers were read to the Royal Statistical Society, and another won The Canadian Journal of Statistics 2000 Best Paper Award. The Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) awarded him a Gold Medal for research in 1998 and an honorary membership in 2012. Jim was president of the Psychometric Society in 1981–82 and president of the SSC in 2002–03. The following conversation took place at Jim's home in Ottawa, Ontario, on March 14 and April 4, 2012.     

Implementation of the revenue-maximizing auction by an ignorant seller

In a general auction framework with independent private values, we propose a game, with a simple economic interpretation, that allows to implement the revenue-maximizing auction outcome when the seller ignores the distributions of the different bidders’ valuations. In this detail-free implementation procedure, an ascending-price contest is organized and the winner volunteers a payment to the seller; this payment can then be challenged by another bidder who knows the distribution of the winner’s valuation.Received: 4 June 2003, Accepted: 4 April 2005, We have benefited from comments by seminar participants at the Econometric Society North American Winter Meeting and European Meeting, PURC University of Florida, University of Wisconsin, as well as by two referees and an Associate Editor. The authors also wish to acknowledge the hospitality of IDEI in Toulouse where they started this research. The second author acknowledges the financial support of CRSHC, CIRANO and the Bell University Labs.     

An Interview with Jae C. Lee

Jae Chang Lee was born in Chang‐Nyoung, South Korea, on 9 August, 1942. After high school, he attended Seoul National University during a period of military dictatorship. As a leader of the student protest movement, he was forced to flee the country. He completed undergraduate and graduate studies at Ohio State University (PhD 1972) in USA and then joined the faculty at Moravian College in Pennsylvania. He returned permanently to South Korea in 1981 to a faculty position at Korea University. He has held visiting positions at the US National Bureau of Standards, the US Naval Coastal Systems Center, Ohio State University, Temple University, the University of Wollongong and Chuo University. Professional contributions include President of International Statistical Institute, Organiser of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) Congress in Seoul in 2001, President of the International Association for Statistical Computing and of the Korean Statistical Society (KSS), Editor, Journal of the Korean Statistical Society and Co‐Editor, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. Honours include ISI Methorst Award, Distinguished Service Award (KSS), Presidential Award for Statistical Contribution and Order of Service Merit from the Korean Government, Certificate of Distinguished Contribution from the Japanese Society of Computational Statistics and elected member, Korean Academy of Science and Technology. The interview was conducted during 23–27 April 2013, at Jae C's country home in Pocheon City.     

Sibling rivalry: The emergence of competition among the baby bells

The Modification of Final Judgment (MFJ) prohibits the seven regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) spun off by AT&T from competing with one another in various markets ‘adjacent’ to the local telephone exchange. I have examined the competitiveness of three of these adjacent markets (cellular telephone, paging services, and yellow pages publishing) since divestiture in order to assess the likelihood of collusion among the RBOCs. On the basis of a decade of post-divestiture experience, I find the prospect of collusion to be remote and, hence, the probability of anticompetitive effects from lifting the MFJ to be vanishingly small.     

An Interview with Chris Skinner

Chris Skinner was born in London on 12 March 1953. He completed a BA in mathematics in 1975 at the University of Cambridge. He then obtained an MSc degree in statistics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1976 and worked as an assistant statistician in the Central Statistical Office for 1 year. After working as a research assistant in LSE from 1977 to 1978, he joined the University of Southampton as a lecturer in 1978, where he earned a PhD in social statistics in 1982. He remained at the University of Southampton, where he became a senior lecturer in 1989 and professor of statistics in 1994. While serving as the head of his department from 1997 to 2000, he played a crucial role in the creation of an MSc programme in official statistics in 1999. In 2011, he returned to the LSE, where he currently holds the position of professor of statistics. Chris is the author of over 80 peer‐reviewed articles in statistical journals and the co‐editor of two influential books on the analysis of survey data. He made significant research contributions covering areas that include the analysis of survey data, inference in the presence of non‐response and measurement errors and statistical disclosure control. He served on several advisory committees, including the Statistical Methods Advisory Committee at Statistics Canada (from 2000 to 2011) and the National Statistics Methodology Advisory Committee in the United Kingdom (from 2001 to 2010). He has received numerous awards and honors for his outstanding contributions to survey sampling and social statistics. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. In 2009, he received the West Medal from the Royal Statistical Society for contributions to social statistics, and in 2010, he was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. In 2019, he also received the Waksberg award to recognize his contributions to survey methodology. The following conversation took place at LSE on 21 May 2019.     

Interview with Professor Adrian FM Smith

Adrian Smith joined The Alan Turing Institute as Institute Director and Chief Executive in September 2018. In May 2020, he was confirmed as President Elect of the Royal Society. He is also a member of the government's AI Council, which helps boost AI growth in the UK and promote its adoption and ethical use in businesses and organisations across the country. Professor Smith's previous role was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London where he was in post from 2012. He is a past President of the Royal Statistical Society and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 in recognition of his contribution to statistics. In 2003-04 Professor Smith undertook an inquiry into Post-14 Mathematics Education for the UK Secretary of State for Education and Skills and in 2017, on behalf of Her Majesty's Treasury and the Department for Education, published a 16-18 Maths Review. In 2006 he completed a report for the UK Home Secretary on the issue of public trust in Crime Statistics. He received a knighthood in the 2011 New Year Honours list. The following conversation took place at the Alan Turing Institute in London, on July 19 2019.     

A Conversation with Jean‐Louis Bodin

Jean‐Louis Bodin has had a distinguished career as an official statistician in the French and European statistical systems, where he has been working for 40 years. Born in 1941 in Bordeaux, the capital city of one of the most famous vineyards in the world, he became graduate of two French prestigious schools, the Ecole Polytechnique in 1963, then the ENSAE (Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique) in 1966. After having spent 20 years in different positions in the French Statistical System, he dedicated the last 20 years of his career to international relations in official statistics and cooperation for strengthening statistical capacities of transition and developing countries. In particular, he was one of the main drafters of the UN Resolution on Fundamental Principles for Official Statistics and of the African Statistical Charter. He is also known for having created AFRISTAT, the Economic and Statistical Observatory of Sub‐Saharan African countries. He was also during years one of the French representatives in the UN Statistical Commission, the UN Conference of European Statisticians and the Statistical Committee Programme of the European Union. Jean‐Louis Bodin has played for 40 years a very active role in national and international statistical societies. He served on many disparate positions in the ISI family: executive director of the International Association of Survey Statisticians from 1981 to 1985 under the successive chairmanships of Gérard Théodore and Leslie Kish, founding member in 1985 with Vera Nyitrai of the International Association for Official Statistics and president of the Association from 1989 to 1991, secretary‐general of the National Organizing Committee of the 47th ISI Session held in Paris in August 1989, Chair of the Programme Coordinating Committee of the 50th ISI Session held in Beijing in August 1995, ISI president‐elect then president from 1997 to 2001, president of the Jury of the Mahalanobis Prize from 2002 to 2005. He was also president of the Société de Statistique de Paris in 1994. He received the certificate of Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1996 and was a member of the ASA Committee for International Relations in Statistics from 1993 to 1997. He was bestowed in 2006 as a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) in France and in 1997 as a Kawaleski Orderu Zas?ugi(Knight of the Order of Merit) in Poland. He received the Medal of Statistical Merit in Vietnam in 2003 and the African Statistical Award bestowed by the UN Economic Conference for Africa in 2012. This conversation was held in June 2013 with Gilbert Saporta in Paris. Gilbert Saporta: Welcome to this interview, Jean‐Louis. I'm delighted that you could spend some time with me to discuss your career, your achievements and your views on some aspects of official statistics. It appears that your professional career as a French official statistician and your participation in ISI activities were tightly linked.

     

MIMO系统中的数据检测

BLAST提议在MIMO信道中获取更高的频谱利用率,大部分BLAST算法的研究结果认为,在接收端存在时空的白躁声和干扰。现研究在空间和时间都存在干扰的情况下一个MIMO系统的信道估计和数据检测。得到最大似然信道估计和空间干扰相关矩阵。通过利用已知的时间干扰相关特性,按照最小均方误差准则扩展一个时槽（无效的检测）到对多时槽版本。在独立的瑞利衰落信道下估计MIMO系统中未编码的QPSK的误码率。     

Revisiting the line-of-business restrictions

The telecommunications industry has undergone significant changes since the divestiture of the Bell System. These changes, particularly in state and federal regulatory policy, have served to increase the social costs and decrease the social benefits of the line-of -business restrictions imposed by the Modification of the Final Judgement (MFJ). The increased costs and reduced benefits of the MFJ provide a strong case for their abolition.     

Adults' Statistical Literacy: Meanings, Components, Responsibilities

Statistical literacy is a key ability expected of citizens in information-laden societies, and is often touted as an expected outcome of schooling and as a necessary component of adults'numeracy and literacy. Yet, its meaning and building blocks have received little explicit attention. This paper proposes a conceptualization of statistical literacy and describes its key components. Statistical literacy is portrayed as the ability to interpret, critically evaluate, and communicate about statistical information and messages. It is argued that statistically literate behavior is predicated on the joint activation of five interrelated knowledge bases (literacy, statistical, mathematical, context, and critical), together with a cluster of supporting dispositions and enabling beliefs. Educational and research implications are discussed, and responsibilities facing educators, statisticians, and other stakeholders are outlined.     

Industrial statistics and its recent contributions to total quality in the Netherlands

The use of statistical methods in quality management has a long history. Most of the pioneers, such as Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming, refer to themselves as statisticians. Statistical thinking in industry means that all work is a series of interconnected processes, that all processes show variation, and that a reduction in variation is the key for continuous improvement. In the statistical literature we find several approaches to achieve this: quality by inspection, quality by process control and quality by design. In this paper we give a survey of the contributions of Dutch statisticians during the last five years.