Competition Policy In Networked Industries With Application To Telecommunications

Networked industries, which are conventionally government-run or regulated monopolies, are distinct from other industries in such aspects as network externality and cooperation between competitors, which makes competition even more difficult to develop in these industries. Since 1980s, networked industries have been witnessing liberalization; governments have therefore been facing a new challenge to bring meaningful competition into these deregulated industries through enforcement of effective competition policy. By comparison, China's market reform is executed without existence of a general competition policy, which adds even more uncertainty and complication to the competition reform in networked industries in China. For example, although a series of structural reform in telecommunications service industry has resulted in an oligopolistic market in terms of the number of players, effective competition has not been seen as expected, which has become a focal point in bringing the industry to a new level of reform, particularly under impending technological and market convergence.The purpose of competition policy lies in the improvement of market outcome such as efficiency and welfare through public intervention which affects the market environment including private actions of firms. In a broader sense, the concept of competition policy may encompass all public initiatives that promote competition, which can take the form of either a general competition law, i.e., anti-trust law, or a sector-specific regulation. However, a narrowly defined competition policy is limited only to anti-trust, which deals with competition issues in the economy as a whole and is conceptually distinct from sector-specific regulation. Despite the semantic differences, the term "competition policy' in this dissertation is rather loosely defined, which may mean any form of policy initiatives (either anti-trust or regulation) aiming at...