A Comparison of the Evolution of Telecommunication Prices in Regulated and Unregulated Markets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the liberalization of the telecommunications markets in the 90s, national regulators have focused on achieving a sufficient level of competition in the market. To this end, authorities have applied plenty of regulation with a focus on increasing the number of competitors and achieving constant reductions in prices. However, in some of these countries (like the USA), this kind of regulation has been abandoned, while in others, (like EU countries) is still applied. This objective is due to the regulatory model considered by authorities in their decisions, according to which the only benchmark for success is the price and what matters is the number of competitors and their market shares. This causes the authorities to identify improvement in social welfare with price reductions, regardless of other desirable considerations for the sustainability of markets. In consequence, most regulators, especially in the European Union, focus on the static efficiency of markets, ignoring their dynamic efficiency. It is widely believed that in less regulated markets there is more investment and innovation, but prices remain higher than in regulated markets. Meanwhile, economic theory states that in a non-regulated market, prices will tend to the minimum level allowing to recover the costs of providing services. Additionally, innovation will make those costs decline over time, and so, prices will tend to be lower, either in absolute terms or in relation to the utility of the services. The different regulatory situation in the USA and in the EU provides a good scenario in order to contrast those hypotheses, by comparing the evolution of prices in both markets. It is generally recognized that the telecommunication market is heavily regulated in European countries, whereas it is relatively unregulated in U.S. In this paper, we will make an empirical analysis of the evolution of prices of telecommunications services. We will study the evolution of prices in some markets of developed countries with different levels of regulations, in order to verify if regulated countries have enjoyed larger price reductions than countries with lower regulation, and what, if any, are the consequences in terms of innovation and investment. We will analyze different EU countries, together with Canada, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. We will review a set of parameters for a period of 10 / 15 years, including prices, population, customers, regulation and investment. We intend to use the Customer Price Index for telecommunications services to measure the evolution of prices, the Regulatory Density Index by Polynomics AG to measure the intensity of regulation, and data from the World Bank, the ITU and other public sources to represent the rest of parameters. Our preliminary findings suggest that the evolution of prices has been similar in lightly regulated markets like the US or Korea than in heavily regulated ones like the EU or Japan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".