IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bbk/bbkefp/2202.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Protecting Sticky Consumers in Essential Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Walter Beckert

    (Birkbeck, University of London)

  • Paolo Siciliani

    (Bank of England)

Abstract

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions that are aimed at protecting sticky consumers who are exposed to the risk of being taken advantage of. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares. This setting encompasses many markets in which established firms are challenged by new entrants. We identify circumstances under which such interventions can be counterproductive: with regard to the stated consumer protection objective and also with regard to the complementary aim to promote competition.

Suggested Citation

  • Walter Beckert & Paolo Siciliani, 2022. "Protecting Sticky Consumers in Essential Markets," Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance 2202, Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bbk:bbkefp:2202
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/48824
    File Function: First version, 2022
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    switching costs; price discrimination; uniform pricing; most-favoured customer clauses; price regulation; competition;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • D4 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bbk:bbkefp:2202. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/departments/ems/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.