The Effects of Access Regulation on Investment and the Implication for an Optimal access pricing policy

This study was conducted during an internship at the Office of the Chief Economist of the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets, ACM. Initially, I intended to give a literature review on the relevant theoretical and empirical studies which investigate the effects of access regulation on electronic communications. This literature review was aimed to provide the employees of ACM with an overview of the existing works so that they can consider which impacts their undertaken access regulation has and possibly change their regulatory policy. Therefore, section 3 and 4 are a rather extensive reviewing part of this thesis. As a further remainder of this intention, the appendix is also comprehensive. It summarizes all treated theoretical models focusing on the underlying mechanisms in order to provide the employees of ACM with the possibility to grasp the functioning of the technical models. In order to better structure and assess the theoretical and empirical findings, I decided to develop several scenarios that consider the impacts of access regulation with respect to different policy goals. This analytical work motivated me to form my thesis out of the preceding literature review. Moreover, as the undertaken analysis turned out to be not directly applicable to the Netherlands, which is characterized by a well-developed cable network, I was encouraged to investigate how the implications change when accounting for additional competition from an unregulated cable network. My work strongly benefitted from the productive working atmosphere at the ACM in The Hague. I gratefully acknowledge the support of Prof. Dr. Jarig van Sinderen and Drs. Robert Stil and would like to thank Joos Francke and Wendy Swelsen (all ACM) for insightful comments. All opinions expressed in this thesis are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the ACM.