Economic Regulation Cases and Materials

The first three chapters of this book cover topics that have long been staples in economic regulation courses—how healthy markets perform, the sources and effects of the most common forms of market failure, and the issues that arise recurrently in attempting to implement traditional cost-of-service regulation. The fourth chapter describes the etiology of regulatory failure in several contexts. It analyzes the symptoms and sources of poor performance in markets that were long subject to traditional cost-of-service regulation. The fifth chapter describes and analyzes in detail the forms of regulation that have come to dominate the "network" industries: telecommunications, natural gas, and electricity. The sixth chapter introduces readers to attempts to integrate economic regulation and environmental regulation.