IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jcomle/v1y2005i3p449-472..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Bargaining Over Fixed-To-Mobile Termination Rates: Countervailing Buyer Power As A Constraint On Monopoly Power

Author

Listed:
  • Ken Binmore
  • David Harbord

Abstract

The conventional wisdom that mobile operators are able to act as monopolists in pricing call termination on their networks has recently been challenged by Hutchison 3G's entry into European mobile markets. The European Commission's electronic communications regime allows national regulatory authorities to regulate mobile termination rates if an operator is found to possess ‘significant market power’. This requires that the mobile operator not be constrained by the ‘countervailing buyer power’ of incumbents. The claim that incumbent operators possess countervailing buyer power has been dismissed repeatedly because of their obligation to interconnect with other networks. This conclusion is erroneous. We analyse bargaining over fixed-to-mobile termination rates and demonstrate that the existence of an interconnectivity obligation is entirely consistent with new entrants such as Hutchison 3G having no market power at all in pricing call termination on their own networks.

Suggested Citation

  • Ken Binmore & David Harbord, 2005. "Bargaining Over Fixed-To-Mobile Termination Rates: Countervailing Buyer Power As A Constraint On Monopoly Power," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 1(3), pages 449-472.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:1:y:2005:i:3:p:449-472.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/joclec/nhi013
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

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

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Mark Armstrong & Julian Wright, 2009. "Mobile Call Termination," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 119(538), pages 270-307, June.
    2. Tommaso Valletti, 2009. "Mobile Call Termination: A Tale of Two-Sided Markets," Chapters, in: François Lévêque & Howard Shelanski (ed.), Antitrust and Regulation in the EU and US, chapter 7, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    3. Harbord, David & Hoernig, Steffen, 2010. "Welfare Analysis of Regulating Mobile Termination Rates in the UK (with an Application to the Orange/T-Mobile Merger)," MPRA Paper 21515, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Brito, Duarte & Pereira, Pedro, 2009. "Product differentiation when competing with the suppliers of bottleneck inputs," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 43-53, January.
    5. David Harbord & Steffen Hoernig, 2015. "Welfare Analysis of Regulating Mobile Termination Rates in the U.K," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(4), pages 673-703, December.
    6. Christos Genakos & Tommaso Valletti, 2011. "Testing The “Waterbed” Effect In Mobile Telephony," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(6), pages 1114-1142, December.
    7. Harbord, David & Pagnozzi, Marco, 2008. "On-Net/Off-Net Price Discrimination and 'Bill-and-Keep' vs. 'Cost-Based' Regulation of Mobile Termination Rates," MPRA Paper 14540, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Jerry A. Hausman, 2012. "Two-sided Markets with Substitution: Mobile Termination Revisited," Chapters, in: Gerald R. Faulhaber & Gary Madden & Jeffrey Petchey (ed.), Regulation and the Performance of Communication and Information Networks, chapter 13, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    9. Genakos, Christos & Valletti, Tommaso, 2012. "Regulating prices in two-sided markets: The waterbed experience in mobile telephony," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(5), pages 360-368.
    10. Vogelsang, Ingo, 2010. "The relationship between mobile and fixed-line communications: A survey," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 4-17, March.

    More about this item

    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:oup:jcomle:v:1:y:2005:i:3:p:449-472.. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jcle .

    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.