We develop an industry specific model of price competition with product differentiation to analyze the effect of entry regulation on process innovation in the Swiss mail industry. We consider the four most prominent scenarios: regulated monopoly, end-to-end competition, worksharing without bypass, and worksharing with bypass. Based on model calibration with data from the Swiss letter market, we find that the incentives to invest in process innovation decrease with deregulation. However, even accounting for this fact, the efficiency gains from partial liberalization, i.e. worksharing, ensure an increase in social welfare.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Volume (Year): 144 (2008) Issue (Month): I (March) Pages: 37-55 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Find related papers by JEL classification: L51 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - Economics of Regulation L87 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Postal and Delivery Services
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: