Regulating Endogenous Customer Switching Costs
Melbourne Business School Working Paper No.2000-12
40 Pages Posted: 10 Oct 2000
Date Written: September 2000
Abstract
Customer switching costs can limit the opportunities for new entry in some markets. Incumbent firms may be able to reduce these switching costs, but have no incentive to do so without regulatory intervention. For example, in telecommunications, incumbent firms can provide customers with number portability, reducing the cost customers face when moving to a new carrier. This paper considers alternative regulatory policies to deal with these endogenous switching costs. We find that rules requiring an incumbent firm to ameliorate customer switching costs lead to lower pricing by the incumbent but higher pricing by the entrant. These rules can reduce social surplus, particularly if average customer switching costs are relatively low compared to amelioration costs. Regulatory rules also affect the efficiency of the decision to reduce customers' switching costs and the technological choice of the incumbent firm. For example 'customer pays' regulation encourages an efficient amelioration choice but provides poor incentives for the incumbent to choose a least cost amelioration technology. We consider the addition of a 'buy back' rule to standard incumbent-firm-pays regulation and show that this is always preferred to standard firms-pay regulation. Buy-back rules dominate other standard regulatory rules when firms can price discriminate on the basis of customers' switching costs. Further, buy-back rules lead to more efficient technological choices by the incumbent firm.
JEL Classification: L51, L13, D4
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Coordination and Lock-In: Competition with Switching Costs and Network Effects
By Joseph Farrell and Paul Klemperer
-
Coordination and Lock-In: Competition with Switching Costs and Network Effects
By Joseph Farrell and Paul Klemperer
-
Do Firms' Product Lines Include Too Many Varieties?
By Paul Klemperer and Jorge Padilla
-
Compatibility Incentives of a Large Network Facing Multiple Rivals
By David A. Malueg and Marius Schwartz
-
Numbers to the People: Regulation, Ownership and Local Number Portability
By Joshua S. Gans, Stephen P. King, ...
-
Network Effects and Switching Costs in the Market for Routers and Switches
By Chris Forman and Pei-yu Chen