This note shows how the transmission system can enhance competition in price-regulated power industries, thus extending earlier findings reported in the literature for deregulated industries. In the context of a two-technology, price-regulated power industry, we show that the interconnection of two markets initially supplied by a different monopoly reduces market power and raises welfare. We
Consider a bottleneck monopoly whose access change is regulated above marginal cost and provides access to an oligopoly of downstream firms. Should the monopolist be allowed to vertically integrate into the downstream market? For the general run of oligopolistic market structures, we show that a vertical merger (or any set of vertical restraints that eliminates