Monopoly is a major theme in the Wealth of Nations, as reflected in 175 usages of the word in the work, and, when applied to a single business, Smith’s opening analysis will be well known to students of economics today
Scaling geologic time to (say) one year, homo sapiens has existed for less than an hour. In that twinkling of an eye, we have developed some capacity for foresight – an enormous evolutionary leap in one of nature’s creatures.
“Change” was the slogan of the British Labour Party in the recent General Election. It certainly didn’t do serious damage to electoral prospects; but it
It was a great pleasure to spend two, sunny, late November days in Melbourne this year (2019) discussing the future of regulatory policy with Australian
Markets have the following characteristics or elements: A. Like all social institutions they are shared sets of rules governing or guiding aspects of human conduct.
Delivered as part of ‘The evolution of UK regulatory policy in retrospect: What has worked well? What hasn’t? What can be learned from experience?’, Annual Competition and Regulation Conference 2016
Delivered as part of ‘The evolution of UK regulatory policy in retrospect: What has worked well? What hasn’t? What can be learned from experience?’, Annual Competition and Regulation Conference 2016
Delivered as part of ‘Regulation of markets and networks in the UK: the state of play in a period of economic and political insecurity’, Annual Westminster Conference 2015
The word market is widely used in contemporary economic and political discourse, but usually without any clear sense of what it means or is meant to refer to. In a literal sense, people do not know what they are talking about. The first part of the essay therefore examines the question: what is a market?
The answer is that a market is an economic institution, i.e. a set/system of rules that structures, regulates or governs a particular set of activities involving exchange of goods and services. It encompasses both the system of rules and the activities governed by them and it serves a specific, particular purpose or function, which is to reduce the costs of exchange transactions
Delivered as part of ‘Coherence and stability in regulatory practice’, Annual Westminster Conference 2014
Delivered as part of ‘Coherence and stability in regulatory practice’, Annual Westminster Conference 2014
A presentation to the Palanza Seminar, 4-6 October 2012, Sestri, Levante.
The purpose of this note is to draw attention to a generally neglected aspect of assessing market power in the supply of airport services. It develops a point made en passant in a paper written by the current author and George Yarrow for the UK CAA in 20101. The paper stressed that, although it was the standard practice in competition assessments to define substitution possibilities from within a defined market, sources of constraint on market power also arose from substitutable products defined to lie outside the relevant market and that it was the cumulative effect of all the substitution possibilities that determined the own-price elasticity of demand for a product or service.
Beesley Lecture series XX
Delivered as part of ‘Is there an end game for regulation with competitive markets’, Hertford Seminar in Regulation 2000
From time to time UK governments and their agencies have been concerned about the level of competion in the beer market, and, in particular, whether competition is sufficiently effective to ensure that, given the government tax take, prices are kept low in relation to costs.