Towards Improved Methods of Analyzing Policy Issues Related to Interstate Telephone Services,

摘要

The regulation of a multiservice firm or group of firms such as those which make up the interstate telephone system is a complex undertaking. It has been proposed that issues related to pricing telecommunications services and industry structure be analyzed by maximizing the sum of consumers'surplus and producers'surplus,subject to certain constraints. The report describes three important additional steps in the process of implementing and extending the analysis of regulatory pricing issues. First,the approach is broadened to include objective functions other than total surplus;second,procedures are developed for estimating the coefficients of cross-elastic demand functions for interstate telephone services;and third,preliminary estimates of the demand coefficients for a seven-service representation of interstate telephone services are developed from material filed in support of rate changes by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).