Workshops and Annual Conference

Pricing Tests for Commodity Bundles - Workshop
Thursday April 3, 14.00-18.00 hrs, The Hague, OPTA

Many products and services are produced with common costs and sold in bundles. It is often difficult - and sometimes impossible - to allocate total fixed costs of production to the various components of a commodity bundle. It is often rational, both for a dominant supplier and for its rivals, to offer substitutes and complements with implicit cross-subsidization. For a regulator, offerings above incremental costs but below total average costs may appear predatory - which they certainly can be, but not always.

The complexity of pricing tests for commodity bundles makes it difficult to assess the competitive nature of observed pricing strategies, creating a risk of errors in intervention. To correctly assess the predatory nature of pricing, or attempts of price-squeeze, for example, requires a good understanding of the component relations, the structure of common costs and the ability of efficient rivals to replicate specific product bundles. This often requires advanced economic modelling and sophisticated empirical analysis.

In this workshop, ENCORE brings several leading practitioners together to discuss the latest developments in pricing tests for commodity bundles from both a legal and an economic point of view.

Contributors to this workshop are: Andrea Coscelli (CRA International), Peter Eijsvoogel (Allen & Overy) and Patrick Greenlee (US Department of Justice). The workshop will be chaired by Maarten Pieter Schinkel (ENCORE/ACLE).

For further information and registration, click here.

Calling Party's Network Pays vs Bill and Keep - Workshop
Tuesday April 22, 14.00 - 18.00 hrs, The Hague, Koninklijke Schouwburg

In wholesale interconnection, two different payment systems exist: the calling party's network pays (CPNP) system and the bill and keep (BaK) system. Traditionally, telephone operators in the Netherlands have used CPNP, which is also dominant in other European countries. Under this system, the initiating operator pays the receiving operator for terminating a call. At the retail level, CPNP is usually combined with the calling party pays (CPP) system, under which the customer that makes the call bears all the costs. Alternatively - as for instance in US mobile telephony - operators interconnect on a BaK basis. Under this latter system, there are no payments between the operators. BaK is usually - but not necessarily - combined with the receiving party pays (RPP) system at the retail level. Under RPP, the costs of the call are divided amongst the calling and the receiving customer.

The two systems appear to have importantly different implications. BaK has been argued to stimulate competition between operators, resulting in lower consumer prices. This, in turn, would reduce the burden of regulatory agencies to monitor the markets for telephony and other data traffic. On the other hand, there is indication that CPNP creates more incentives to invest in maintaining and extending networks.

In this ENCORE workshop, various aspects of the two alternative payment systems are introduced and discussed by prominent contributors to the international debate. After an introduction of the basic concepts, there will be a presentation of theoretical and empirical findings, after which an outlook will be sketched. Apart from telephony, examples will be drawn from other forms of data traffic, most notably the internet.

Contributors to this workshop are: Carlo Cambini (Politecnico Turin), Stephen Littlechild (Cambridge University) and Scott Marcus (WIK-Consult). The workshop will be chaired by Stein Smeets (Dialogic).

For further information and registration, click here.

29 May New Date ENCORE Annual Conference "Competition and Media Markets"
Thursday May 29, Hilversum, Instituut voor Beeld en geluid

The ENCORE Annual Conference has been rescheduled to Thursday May 29.

Key-note speakers to this year's Annual Conference will be:
Prof.dr. M. Peitz - University of Mannheim
Dr. G. Miersch - European Commission

More information will be available at the ENCORE-website soon.

 
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ENCORE Networks

New ENCORE Associate

On behalf of NMa/DTe, Machiel Mulder joined the ENCORE Associates Network.

 
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ENCORE Program 2008

ENCORE's Program for 2008 can be found on the website. By clicking on the various activities, the subjects and set-ups can be read.

 
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Competition around the World

EC Competition Enforcement Data

Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics, University of Amsterdam
April 10-11, 2008

The Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (ACLE) at the University of Amsterdam organizes its fourth annual Competition & Regulation
Meeting. This year's topic is EC Competition Enforcement Data.

For further information, click here.

Market Governance and Innovation

TILEC, Tilburg University
April 14, 2008

Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) will celebrate its fifth anniversary with a conference on the theme “Market governance and innovation”.

For further information, click here.

 
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Organization

ENCORE is an open platform that operates within the broad sphere of Industrial Organization, with an emphasis on issues of competition and regulation. ENCORE is located at the University of Amsterdam. More information can be found on www.encore.nl/about .

ENCORE Once More

This e-mail newsletter aims to inform about ENCORE-activities and replaces the many separate e-mail invitations to participate in ENCORE-events. If you wish to unsubscribe, please send us an e-mail with 'unsubscribe' in the header.
info@encore.nl

 
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