Big Tech’s Novel Harms: Antitrust or Regulation?

This chapter explores policy options for novel harms like privacy, fake news, or hate speech in digital markets. The discussion shows that the novel harms allegedly inherent in big tech firms are not strictly related to monopoly power. Regulation is thus the way forward, not competition. And consumer protection regulation is a better approach than competition spirited “utilities regulation” or revenue-sharing driven “retail regulation.”

Recent Regulatory and Legislative Developments of Interest to Energy Lawyers

This article provides an overview of recent regulatory and legislative developments of interest to energy lawyers. This includes the legal, political, and economic background to, and consequences of, new legislation and regulatory regimes. This also includes discussions of recent and ongoing judicial and regulatory decisions involving energy law. Topics discussed include market access, environmental and climate change regulation, Aboriginal consultation, and utilities regulation.

Research opportunities in performance measurement in public utilities regulation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to choose a set of scientific articles about performance measurement in public utilities regulation. The method is designed to identify references with high academic relevance in databases accessed via the internet, and, through these articles, to perform a mapping of these publications and conduct a systemic analysis. Design/methodology/approach – The study is characterized as exploratory and descriptive with a qualitative and quantitative approach. Incorporates an inductive logic, and draws on primary and secondary data sources. The research involves the application of a technical procedure for selection and study of selected articles. To this end, the process selected was the Knowledge Development Process – Constructivist (ProKnow-C). Findings – The result was a set of 16 renowned scientific articles and, for these papers, the main periodicals, papers, authors and keywords of the topic stood out. The content analysis allowed the identification of highlights and opportunities for future research. Originality/value – The originality of the paper lies in presenting a structured process for identifying relevant academic articles relating to the research context and, for these articles, find prominences and opportunities for a research theme without similar papers.

Firm Regulation and Profit Sharing: A Real Option Approach

To avoid the extremely high profit levels found in the recent experience of public utilities' regulation, some regulators have introduced a profit-sharing (PS) rule that revises prices to the benefit of consumers. However, in order to be successful, a PS rule should satisfy appropriate incentive conditions.In this paper, we study the incentive properties of a second best PS mechanism designed by the regulator to induce a regulated monopolist to divert its "excessive" profits to the customers. In a real option model where a regulated monopolist manages a long-term franchise contract and the regulator has the option to revoke the contract if there is serious welfare loss, we first endogenously derive the welfare maximising PS rule under the verifiability of profits. We then explore the dynamic efficiency of this PS rule under the non-verifiability of profits and study the firm's incentive to comply with it in an infinite-horizon game. Finally, we derive the price adjustment path which follows the adoption of a PS rule in a price cap regulation.We show that the riskiness of the distribution of the firm's future profits and the regulator's cost in revoking the franchise contract are key factors in determining the equilibrium properties of a dynamic PS rule.