The Effect of Endogenous Regulation on Telecommunications Expansion and Efficiency in Latin America

I examine the effect of reform on telecom performance using a second-generation regulatory framework index and panel data techniques to test how regulatory governance affected sector performance in 22 Latin American countries during the period 1980–1997. Sound regulatory governance in telecommunications has a positive impact on network expansion and efficiency, in both the static and dynamic specifications. Openness of markets to competition and divestment of former state-owned telco operators also contributed positively to better sector performance. The dynamic specification shows that past performance has its own strong effect on present (and perhaps future) performance.     

Neutrality in arrow and other impossibility theorems

Summary. Although not assumed explicitly, we show that neutrality plays an important role in Arrow and other impossibility theorems. Applying it to pivotal voters we produce direct proofs of classical impossibility theorems, including Arrow's, as well as extend some of these theorems. We further explore the role of neutrality showing that it is equivalent to Pareto or reverse Pareto, and to effective dictatorship for non-null social welfare functions satisfying the principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives. It is also equivalent to Wilson's Citizens' Sovereignty--which is related to the intuition that symmetry over alternatives makes social preference depend only on citizens' preferences. We show that some of these results are more fundamental than others in that they extend both to infinite societies and to considerably smaller domains of preferences. Finally, as an application of Arrow's theorem, we provide a simple proof of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.Received: 13 April 2000, Revised: 6 December 2002, JEL Classification Numbers: D71, C70.I thank Salvador Barberá, Luis Corchón, Cesar Martinelli, Eric Maskin, Tomas Sjöström, Ricard Torres, José Pedro Ubeda, and an anonymous referee for feedback. The proofs of Arrow's theorem and two Wilson's theorems come from a note I wrote in 1987 at Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (Ubeda [16]). In 1996 Geanakoplos [7] wrote a proof of Arrow's theorem similar but not identical to mine. All work in this paper is independent of his.     

Risk Sharing in a World with Processing Costs: Trading versus Banking

We analyze the bank versus exchange problem in a Diamond Dybvig (1983) economy with exogenous transaction processing costs. We find that processing costs in the market enables the bank to overcome the side trade threat ( Jacklin (1987) ) and offer some desirable liquidity insurance. Moreover, in the bank equilibrium processing costs are proportional to consumption, while in the market economy early and late consumers incur equal costs. These two effects explain that for a given level of aggregate processing costs, the bank economy is superior. On the other hand, the number of transactions in the bank economy is larger. It is for this reason that if processing costs are proportional to transaction value, and independent of the mechanism used, the exchange economy is superior.     

Testing for Unit Roots with Breaks: Evidence on the Great Crash and the Unit Root Hypothesis Reconsidered

Nelson and Plosser (1982), in a classic paper, failed to find strong evidence against the null hypothesis of a generating process with a unit autoregressive root for thirteen US macroeconomic time series. Perron (1989) claimed that such evidence was available for a majority of these series if the alternative hypothesis was of trend stationarity with a break in 1929. Zivot and Andrews (1992) treated the break date as endogenous, then finding strong evidence agcainst the null for a minority of these series. Our own analysis extends theirs by permitting a break under the null as well as the alternative hypothesis, and allowing for the sequential nature of the testing. Our empirical findings complete the circle. We find no strong evidence against the unit root hypothesis for any of the thirteen Nelson–Plosser series.     

First organise, then automate: a modern socio-technical view on ERP systems and teamworking

Previous empirical work demonstrated that self-managing teamwork and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are difficult to combine in practice, and have called for the development of templates for configuring ERP systems to support teamworking. This requires a view on organisation design, dealing with both in an integrated fashion. 'Modern Socio-technology' provides such a view. We discuss its underlying principles and show how it relates to ERP.     

The endless need for regulation in telecommunication: An explanation

Telecommunication services have existed as a legal monopoly nearly throughout its entire history. In 1998, telecom market liberalisation was achieved across the European Union (EU) through the introduction of competition among telephone services. Asymmetrical obligations were deemed necessary in order to compensate the market power of the former monopolist.As the evolution of asymmetrical regulation in Spain illustrates, obligations and the telecommunications operators subject to them increased with the regulatory framework established in 2002 in the EU. This new regulatory framework may continue to expand through the inclusion of functional separation as another possible asymmetrical obligation. In short, it seems that the regulatory pressure on the telecommunications industry is increasing, despite the lapse in time since the liberalisation of the industry.In this paper, a methodology developed by the Austrian School of Economics is applied in order to explain why the telecommunication market is subject to increasing regulation in Europe, rather than deregulation, after more than 10 years of liberalisation. In particular, Mises's theory of price control is used to explain the evolution of the regulation of local loop unbundling.     

Codes of Conduct in Subcontracting Networks: A Labour Law Perspective

In the past ten years, many European companies organised into subcontracting networks have decided to adopt codes of conduct to regulate labour relations and to ensure the respect of fundamental social rights. This paper first determines the context and the issues to be addressed by codes of conduct within networks of companies, and second analyses the terms under which they can be implemented. The paper argues that codes of conduct can complement the standards developed by States, the European Union or the social partners, but that steps should be taken in order to avoid that these texts replace the existing labour law.     

Dominance Statistics: A Simulation Study on the d Statistic

Quality &; Quantity - Cliff (1993) has proposed the use of a measure of effect size alternative to traditionalmean differences: δ {? = Pr(xi1 &;gt; xj2) - Pr(xi1 &;lt; xj2)}which,...     

Micro-level product-market dynamics: Shared knowledge and its relationship to market development

This work draws on consumer and psychology research to explain sociocognitive aspects of product-market dynamics at a higher level of specificity than prior research. The authors extend the field’s understanding of market-shaping shared knowledge through a theory-informed discussion of how shared product knowledge comes to exist and how it changes as product markets develop. They define shared knowledge as the aspects of product representations that are common across the minds of market actors, making it possible for them to understand one another. The authors also discuss ways to track shared knowledge content that is expressed in market narratives. As the characteristics of shared knowledge are explained and linked to stages of product-market development, the authors develop a set of researchable propositions to guide future research. The theoretical arguments and propositions in this article complement extant marketing strategy research by integrating individual-level consumer theory with market evolution models. José Antonio Rosa (jose.rosa@case.edu; Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an assistant professor of marketing at Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include product markets as sociocognitive phenomena, embodied knowledge in consumer and managerial sensemaking, consumer illiteracy and coping, commitment and motivation among members of network marketing organizations, and buying group satisfaction. His research has been published in marketing and management publications, including theJournal of Marketing and theAcademy of Management Journal. Before entering academia, he worked in the automotive and information systems industries. Jelena Spanjol (jspanjol@tamu.edu; Ph.D., University of Illinois) is an assistant professor of marketing at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include product market dynamics, product portfolio management, innovation, sensemaking, and organizational and managerial cognition in marketing strategy. Her research has been published in marketing and management publications, including theJournal of Marketing and several book chapters. Before academia, she worked in the scientific software industry.     

Changing rewards in contests: Has the three-point rule brought more offense to soccer?

In the mid-nineties FIFA decided to increase from two to three the number of points assigned to the winning team of a soccer match played under traditional round-robin national leagues. Since a game of soccer can be regarded as a contest, FIFA's measure provides an interesting case-study for analysing how a change in the system of rewards (from a zero to a non-zero sum rule) may affect the contestants' equilibrium behaviour. In this paper we try to assess, both theoretically and empirically, whether FIFA's new point rule has changed soccer towards a more offensive game, in which teams adopt more risky strategies. In particular, we evaluate the “na?ve hypothesis” according to which the measure would induce every team to play always more offensively, and we explore the extent to which the change in teams' behaviour may be affected by quality differentials between teams. Our most important hypothesis is that when the asymmetry between opposing teams is large enough, an increase in the reward for victory induces the weaker team to play more defensively, rather than the opposite. By looking at a subset of matches held in the Portuguese first division league, which approximate the conditions of our model, we find support for this hypothesis. First version received: July 1999/Final version received: May 2001