Pier Luigi Parcu & Timothy J. Brennan 
New Business and Regulatory Strategies in the Postal Sector 

This book addresses major issues facing postal and delivery services throughout the world. Worldwide, there is currently a considerable amount of interest in postal and delivery economics. The industry is reacting to a state of near crisis and is implementing different drastic changes. The European Commission and member States are still wrestling with the problem of how to implement entry liberalization into postal markets, how to address digital competition, and how to maintain the universal service obligation (USO). The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 in the U.S. has perhaps created and exacerbated the problems faced by USPS.

Digitalisation, technological development and online platforms are strongly affecting both the way postal and delivery operators are managing their services as well as their role on the market. Strong emphasis was attributed to the assets of Postal Operators (POs) and their added value in the digital age as well as on new business strategies.

This volume presents original essays by prominent researchers in the field, selected and edited from papers presented at this year’s 26th Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics held in Split, Croatia, from May 30- June 2, 2018.Topics addressed by this volume include quality of service, last mile solutions, and competition in the liberalized market. This book will be a useful tool not only for graduate students and professors, but also for postal administrations, consulting firms, and federal government departments.   

Table of Content

Chapter 1: Inducing Optimal Quality Under Price Caps: Why, How and Whether.- Chapter 2: To What Extent has E-substitution Impacted the Demand for Letters and Which Factors are Constraining its Advance.- Chapter 3: The Impact of Increasing Competition for Non-Contract Parcels on Postal Prices and Efficiency Decisions.- Chapter 4: How Price Sensitive is Letter Advertising Mail in the UK.- Chapter 5: Creating Last Mile Incentives from Inside-Out: A Template drawn from Rural Telecom.- Chapter 6: Postal Industry Innovation: Exploring New Worlds.- Chapter 7: Compensation Fund in Postal Service: A Step Forward After the Polish Case.- Chapter 8: Crowdsourcing the Last Mile.- Chapter 9: Open-data: A solution when Data constitutes an essential facility?.- Chapter 10: Vertical Integration in the e-commerce sector.- Chapter 11: Consolidation in Urban Logistics: What could we Learn from past Experiences and Economic Theory?.- Chapter 12: Lessons from Other Network Industries: Should Posts Seek to Collaborate More in the Last Mile?.- Chapter 13: Postal Operators as ‘Ground-Based’ Online Platforms?.- Chapter 14: The Transformation of Postal Services in light of Technology Developments and Users’ Needs.- Chapter 15: The Reassessment of the Postal Service.- Chapter 16: Regulating Person to Person Communication.- Chapter 17: Relating Postal Volumes to the Business Cycle by Linear Regression with Integral Equations.- Chapter 18: The Danish Problem.- Chapter 19: Parcel Lockers: An Answer to the Pressure on the Last Mile Delivery?.- Chapter 20: Market Studies as Competition Policy Tools: Applications to Postal Services.

About the author

Pier Luigi Parcu is part-time Professor at the European University Institute (EUI) from 2010. He is currently Area Director of the FSR Communications & Media, Director of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom and Director of the Florence Competition Programme in Law and Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). His research in the area of industrial organization and law and economics focuses on the interaction between regulation and antitrust in shaping firms’ behaviour. As regards research in the media and Internet areas, Professor Parcu’s interests focus on the effects of ownership concentration and internal governance of the media enterprise on pluralism and freedom of expression and on the influence of offline business models on new economic developments related to online platforms, smart cities and artificial intelligence.