Essays in industrial organization

Resumen

Vertical restraints are agreements between firms at different levels of the production and distribution processes. A vast literature has investigated how firms located in the same production process determine the price of input goods or services. Vertical restraints have been also object of the activity of many national competition authorities and even of the European Commission, who has recently published some guidelines on the subject. These guidelines aim to prevent, for instance, negative effects on the market such as foreclosure of other suppliers or buyers, reduction of competition between retailers or distributors and also limitation of choice for the consumers. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how the prices of these input goods or services are determined and how they affect the retail competition, both in a general setting (in the first chapter) and in the telecommunications sector (in the second and third chapters). In the two last chapters we also consider the policies that a regulatory authority can apply in order to tackle the failures of the telecommunications market. The second and the third chapters deal with regulation in the telecom- munications sector. To provide interconnection among all users, networks need access to rivals' consumers. Access is provided after the payment of a termination charge (or access price). This charge is a part of the cost of off-net calls and consequently affects the price of calls. The main subject of the regulatory activity in this market is the regulation of the access prices that are paid by network operators.