IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/ejlwec/v36y2013i3p543-573.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Legal unbundling and auctions in vertically integrated (utilities) markets

Author

Listed:
  • Silvester Koten

Abstract

This paper addresses the effectiveness of auctions and legal unbundling as regulatory measures to tender a vertically integrated industry more competitive. Specifically, I analyze if implementing auctions and legal unbundling can counter market power in an industry where a Vertically Integrated Corporation (VIC) has a monopoly position in an essential, scarce upstream activity and also owns one of the firms active in the competitive downstream activity. In an earlier paper, Van Koten ( 2011 ), I showed that in this configuration the VIC, by having its downstream firm bid more aggressively, can—through increased auction revenue—increase its profit, while disadvantaging downstream competitors and lowering efficiency. Here I analyze the regulatory measure of also legally separating the downstream firm from the VIC. I show that such a measure may only be partially effective; the VIC can formulate a simple compensation scheme that does not violate restrictions typically imposed by legal separation but induces the manager of the VIC-owned downstream firm to bid more aggressively. This increases the profits of the VIC, decreases efficiency, and disadvantages downstream competitors. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2013

Suggested Citation

  • Silvester Koten, 2013. "Legal unbundling and auctions in vertically integrated (utilities) markets," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 36(3), pages 543-573, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:ejlwec:v:36:y:2013:i:3:p:543-573
    DOI: 10.1007/s10657-011-9269-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10657-011-9269-0
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10657-011-9269-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Parisio, Lucia & Bosco, Bruno, 2008. "Electricity prices and cross-border trade: Volume and strategy effects," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 1760-1775, July.
    2. Paul Joskow & Jean Tirole, 2005. "Merchant Transmission Investment," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(2), pages 233-264, June.
    3. Burkart, Mike, 1995. "Initial Shareholdings and Overbidding in Takeover Contests," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 50(5), pages 1491-1515, December.
    4. Adrien de Hauteclocque & Vincent Rious, 2009. "Reconsidering the Regulation of Merchant Transmission Investment in the Light of the Third Energy Package: The Role of Dominant Generators," RSCAS Working Papers 2009/59, European University Institute.
    5. Mathias Dewatripont, 1988. "Commitment Through Renegotiation-Proof Contracts with Third Parties," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 55(3), pages 377-390.
    6. Höffler, Felix & Kranz, Sebastian, 2007. "Legal Unbundling can be a Golden Mean between Vertical Integration and Separation," Bonn Econ Discussion Papers 15/2007, University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE).
    7. van Koten, Silvester, 2012. "Merchant interconnector projects by generators in the EU: Profitability and allocation of capacity," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 748-758.
    8. Krishna, Vijay, 2009. "Auction Theory," Elsevier Monographs, Elsevier, edition 2, number 9780123745071.
    9. Fudenberg, Drew & Tirole, Jean, 1984. "The Fat-Cat Effect, the Puppy-Dog Ploy, and the Lean and Hungry Look," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(2), pages 361-366, May.
    10. Michael L. Katz, 1991. "Game-Playing Agents: Unobservable Contracts as Precommitments," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 22(3), pages 307-328, Autumn.
    11. John Vickers, 1995. "Competition and Regulation in Vertically Related Markets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 62(1), pages 1-17.
    12. van Koten, S. & Ortmann, A., 2008. "The unbundling regime for electricity utilities in the EU: A case of legislative and regulatory capture?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(6), pages 3128-3140, November.
    13. Vickers, John, 1985. "Delegation and the Theory of the Firm," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 95(380a), pages 138-147, Supplemen.
    14. Fershtman, Chaim & Judd, Kenneth L, 1987. "Equilibrium Incentives in Oligopoly," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 77(5), pages 927-940, December.
    15. Øystein Foros & Hans Kind & Lars Sørgard, 2007. "Managerial incentives and access price regulation," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 23(2), pages 117-133, April.
    16. Steven D. Sklivas, 1987. "The Strategic Choice of Managerial Incentives," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 18(3), pages 452-458, Autumn.
    17. Biglaiser, Gary & DeGraba, Patrick, 2001. "Downstream Integration by a Bottleneck Input Supplier Whose Regulated Wholesale Prices Are Above Costs," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 32(2), pages 302-315, Summer.
    18. Avinash Dixit, 2002. "# Incentives and Organizations in the Public Sector: An Interpretative Review," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 37(4), pages 696-727.
    19. Williamson, Oliver E, 1983. "Credible Commitments: Using Hostages to Support Exchange," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(4), pages 519-540, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brito Duarte & Pereira Pedro & Vareda João, 2012. "Does Vertical Separation Necessarily Reduce Quality Discrimination and Increase Welfare?," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 12(1), pages 1-44, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. van Koten, Silvester, 2012. "Merchant interconnector projects by generators in the EU: Profitability and allocation of capacity," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 748-758.
    2. Silvester van Koten, 2007. "Legally Separated Joint Ownership of Bidder and Auctioneer: Illustrated by the Partial Deregulation of the EU Electricity Markets," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp346, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    3. Irmen, Andreas, 1998. "Precommitment in Competing Vertical Chains," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(4), pages 333-359, September.
    4. Caillaud, Bernard & Rey, Patrick, 1995. "Strategic aspects of vertical delegation," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 39(3-4), pages 421-431, April.
    5. Spagnolo, Giancarlo, 2005. "Managerial incentives and collusive behavior," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 49(6), pages 1501-1523, August.
    6. Levent Koçkesen & Efe A. Ok, 2004. "Strategic Delegation By Unobservable Incentive Contracts," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(2), pages 397-424.
    7. Fershtman, Chaim & Kalai, Ehud, 1997. "Unobserved Delegation," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 38(4), pages 763-774, November.
    8. Walter A Cont, 2001. "Essays on Contract Design: Delegation and Agency Problems, and Monitoring Under Collusion," Levine's Working Paper Archive 625018000000000122, David K. Levine.
    9. Øystein Foros & Hans Kind & Lars Sørgard, 2007. "Managerial incentives and access price regulation," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 23(2), pages 117-133, April.
    10. Michael L. Katz, 2006. "Observable Contracts as Commitments: Interdependent Contracts and Moral Hazard," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(3), pages 685-706, September.
    11. Emanuele Gerratana & Levent Koçkesen, 2015. "Commitment without reputation: renegotiation-proof contracts under asymmetric information," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 19(3), pages 173-209, September.
    12. Xiong, Yan & Jiang, Xu, 2022. "Economic consequences of managerial compensation contract disclosure," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(2).
    13. Patrick Legros & Andrew F. Newman, 2014. "Contracts, Ownership, and Industrial Organization: Past and Future," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 30(suppl_1), pages 82-117.
    14. Hongbin Cai & Walter Cont, 2004. "Agency Problems and Commitment in Delegated Bargaining," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(4), pages 703-729, December.
    15. Esther Gal‐Or, 1997. "Multiprincipal Agency Relationships as Implied by Product Market Competition," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 6(1), pages 235-256, June.
    16. Spagnolo, Giancarlo, 1998. "Debt as a (Credible) Collusive Device, or: "Everybody Happy but the Consumer"," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 243, Stockholm School of Economics, revised 01 Aug 2004.
    17. Aghion, Philippe & Dewatripont, Mathias & Legros, Patrick & Zingales, Luigi (ed.), 2016. "The Impact of Incomplete Contracts on Economics," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199826216.
    18. Spagnolo, G., 1999. "Issue Linkage, Delegation, and International Policy Cooperation," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 9913, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    19. Gerratana Emanuele & Koçkesen Levent, 2012. "Strategic Effects of Renegotiation-Proof Contracts," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 12(1), pages 1-49, July.
    20. Michel Cavagnac, 2005. "Strategic managerial incentives under adverse selection," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(8), pages 499-512.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Regulation; Vertical integration; Competition; Electricity markets; Strategic delegation; L22; L43; L51; L94; L98;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure
    • L43 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Legal Monopolies and Regulation or Deregulation
    • L51 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - Economics of Regulation
    • L94 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Electric Utilities
    • L98 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Government Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:ejlwec:v:36:y:2013:i:3:p:543-573. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.