Advanced Search

Quantifying the Benefits of Entry into Local Phone Service

Contents:

Author Info

  • Nicholas Economides

    () (Stern School of Business, NYU)

  • V. Brian Viard

    () (Graduate School of Business, Stanford University)

  • Katja Seim

    () (Stanford University)

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local phone service in New York State. Residential local phone service competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We provide a detailed evaluation of its effects on consumer welfare using household-level data on service choices from the third quarter of 1999 to the first quarter of 2003. Our results indicate that as a result of entry households that subscribe to one of the entrants' services gain on average an equivalent of $2.33 per month in overall welfare from local telecommunications services, or 6.2% of the households' average bill. Averaged across all households including those that remain with the incumbent, households gain the equivalent of $0.83 per month, although benefits vary dramatically across households. Since residential local phone service is sold under a menu of nonlinear tariffs, we develop a method for estimating a mixed discrete/continuous demand model. The econometric model incorporates the simultaneity of the discrete plan and continuous consumption choices by consumers. We allow for flat-rate plans, bundling of services, and unobservable firm quality. Taking advantage of the detailed nature of the data, we decompose the households' overall gains from entry and find that benefits due to firm differentiation and new plan introductions exceed those from price effects.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. 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.
File URL: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/Local_Telecommunications.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by NET Institute in its series Working Papers with number 07-38.

Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML (with abstract), plain text (with abstract), BibTeX, RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite), ReDIF
Length: 49 pages
Date of creation: Oct 2007
Date of revision: Oct 2007
Handle: RePEc:net:wpaper:0738

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.NETinst.org/

For corrections or technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Nicholas Economides).

Related research

Keywords: Entry; Nonlinear Pricing; Telecommunications; Discrete/Continuous Demand;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

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.:
  1. Shane Greenstein & Michael Mazzeo, 2006. "THE ROLE OF DIFFERENTIATION STRATEGY IN LOCAL TELECOMMUNICATION ENTRY AND MARKET EVOLUTION: 1999-2002 -super-* ," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 54(3), pages 323-350, 09.
  2. Stefano DellaVigna & Ulrike Malmendier, 2006. "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(3), pages 694-719, June.
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.
Cited by:
  1. Lukasz Grzybowski & Pedro Pereira, 2007. "The Consumer Loss of the Minimum Duration for Mobile Telephone Calls," Working Papers 26, Portuguese Competition Authority.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:net:wpaper:0738

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Nicholas Economides).

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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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