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As recently as five years ago, markets for mobile wireless services in Europe were performing on par with, or even better than, markets in the United States. Today, there is broad agreement that the EU has fallen behind in at least some dimensions, especially with respect to the deployment of next generation LTE networks. We assess the divergence in performance, analyze its causes, and suggest policy changes that would improve the performance of mobile wireless markets going forward. These include regulatory harmonization of spectrum management, achieving efficient levels of consolidation, and promoting investment and innovation through a focus on dynamic competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on recent developments in the telecommunications policy in the United States. It describes and comments on the theoretical underpinnings of practical regulation in this country and it evaluates its importance for other nations and regions. It also provides a review as to how investment and innovation issues were addressed by US regulation in three various periods. It also poses that one of the challenges faced by communication regulators is the establishment of conditions that facilitate the high capital investment needed to position next-generation networks capable of supporting innovation in new applications and services.

The article presents a survey on managerial incentives and investment bias through a simplified structure of the pertinent information asymmetry. Over the past decades, there has been an increasing concern that stock markets, as well as internal capital markets of the firm, induce investment myopia among managers responsible for capital investments. In particular, the concern has been voiced in connection with the loss of competitive advantage among U.S. companies compared to their Japanese counterparts. Put in more general terms, a bias or a diversion from the preferred rate and direction of investments is claimed to arise in an investment process where the incentives are such that an agent chooses capital investments which have payoffs that are too short-run, too long-run or too risky. This article rests on the belief that economic theory should have the potential to elucidate the driving forces of investment myopia and to suggest appropriate actions and aims to contribute toward this end by focusing the model specification on the managerial problem at hand, summarizing the results, pointing out the critical assumptions, and suggesting avenues for future research and managerial implications.