Consumer Ownership of Natural Monopolies and its Relevance for the Green Transition: The Case of District Heating

District heating is important for the transition to sustainable energy systems. In order to implement district heating, consumers’ trust and acceptance of this technical monopoly structure is necessary. This necessity leads to the question of price regulation and ownership in the district heating sector, since these institutional structures are the measures for creating trust and acceptance. This article is based on a Coasian approach, where information costs and concrete institutional structures are at the centre of the analysis. This approach is applied for the purpose of understanding the role of consumer ownership in the district heating sector. An ownership model which has been shown to be the most efficient in Denmark. Through a detailed empirical case study, it is shown how private commercial companies have avoided the state regulatory monopoly price regulation and inflated consumer prices. The case study also describes how changes in ownership immediately led to price reductions. It is concluded that the consumer ownership model has played a vital role in getting price regulation to succeed and thereby consumers to trust and accept the district heating systems in Denmark. This result is an important contribution to heating policy development as well as monopoly regulation theory.

Improving antitrust instruments for food security

The study aims to substantiate the fact that the development of agro-industrial complex imposes new requirements for the formation of anti-monopoly regulation tools. The authors point out the threat of cartelization of the industry to food security. It is shown that the cartel violations are systemic in the markets of agroindustrial complex. New features typical of cartel behavior of companies have been identified. It was found that the emergence of new software algorithms greatly facilitates collusion on the market, opens up the possibility of changing the nature of competition, which imposes new requirements for the formation of antitrust regulation tools. It has been marked that it is difficult to suppress anticompetitive practices to develop a complex of measures in order to counteract the cartels: modern technologies of data analysis, application of mathematical modeling methods, economic analysis and also prohibition for development and distribution of price algorithms, their use for establishing of price control.

Antitrust regulation as a stimulant innovation processes in the agricultural sector

The article is devoted to the problems of formation of favorable competitive environment in the domestic seed market, reducing the dependence of the domestic market on foreign breeding and genetic materials. The aim of the study is to substantiate new requirements for anti-monopoly regulation of intellectual property in agricultural markets to level out risks to competition. Theoretical basis of the study consists of the publications of modern domestic and foreign scientists on the assessment of risks of restricting access to innovative products and technologies for potential competitors, the development of competition at different levels of the food supply chain. The processes of companies' consolidation at the world seed market and control of the market by the players with intellectual property rights to biotechnologies were reflected. The expediency of development of antitrust regulation in the sphere of intellectual property in the domestic seed market through technological transfer of innovative material to Russian companies is shown. Theoretical significance of the conducted study consists in development of some approaches to anti-monopoly regulation in the sphere of intellectual property in the domestic seed market. The practical significance of the study lies in improving the management of innovation process in the agricultural sector.

OPEX-risk as a source of CAPEX-bias in monopoly regulation

This paper shows with a formal model that under monopoly regulation, OPEX-risk can be a source for a CAPEX-bias. If OPEX and CAPEX are substitutes, the regulated firm can reduce the risk of the firm and thereby reduce the true cost of capital by rebalancing OPEX and CAPEX. If the regulated rate-of-return on capital is not influenced by the firm’s actions, this creates a margin between the regulated rate-of-return and the true cost of capital; this causes a CAPEX-bias. We examine the so-called fixed-OPEX-CAPEX-share (FOCS), which is a variation of TOTEX-regulation, as a promising remedy to address the CAPEX-bias. We argue that FOCS is effective to address the CAPEX-bias, while it can easily be implemented.

Digital Inequality: Internet Technologies in Activation of Consumer Behavior

The paper is focused on the analysis of the territorial distribution of digital inequality in the Russian region and its influence on the level of online trading in the region. The paper presents the results of monitoring studies of the development of competition and of anti-monopoly regulation in the Nizhny Novgorod region, conducted since 2014, and the results of the last survey in 2018 (comparable methodology was used) on 3,000 respondents out of 20 districts of the region, different by their socio-economic situation. The sample is territorially random, representing the population by sex and age. The authors use the concept of digital inequality of the third generation developed by Ragneddа (Ragnedda, 2017) for study of digital inequality in shopping online possibilities. This approach defines digital inequality not only as an information and technological and educational elements in differences of social groups and communities in the Internet access, but also as an inequality of the advantages that groups might get from its use. This type of inequality cannot be overcome only due to technological and popularizing decisions; inequality should be controlled by the state and communities to prevent its escalation and of excluding entire territories from social and economic development. The paper presents the invented methodology for the typology of administrative municipalities of the region, which helps in implementation of state control over competition. All territories of the region were divided into four zones with different degree of government regulation needed. It helps to reduce the imbalance in market development and to lower the digital divide in Internet shopping. A study of the interrelation between online shopping and retail population satisfaction in administrative regions of Russian regions shows the urgent need to expand municipal competition development maps to include shopping online indicators.