Competition Buzz: Market Failures and Economic Regulation in Public Utilities. Approaches to a Discipline Poorly Understood by Lawyers

By: David de la Torre Vargas

Law and Economics find its highest point of interdependence on “Economic Regulation”; a discipline studied by economists for ages. But for a long time, jurists have only dealt with this discipline to solve the problems about its place in the system, or to analyze the powers of authorities that materialize the regulation. Nevertheless, lawyers have not gone to the essence of the regulation: market failures. Concepts such as free competition, natural monopoly, inelastic demand, and economic efficiency, among others, are part of the everyday life of the residential public utilities sector, which is a good context to increase the knowledge on the essence of economic regulation, still unexplored by jurists.

Full Content: SSRN

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