Research Progress on Sharing Pricing in the Natural Monopoly Industries
In the natural monopoly industries,the incumbent enterprises with bottleneck facilities should share the use rights of the bottleneck facilities with the competing enterprises and consumers,so that they can participate in the mar-ket competition or obtain final products,and the competing enterprises and consumers need to pay the sharing price to the incumbent enterprises.Reasonable sharing pricing can promote market competition,optimize resource allocation,and im-prove market efficiency.Based on the connotation of sharing pricing,this paper reviews the classic cutting-edge literature from three aspects:sharing pricing strategy,sharing pricing regulation,and sharing pricing effects,and looks forward to the directions that can be further explored in the future.To begin with,this paper unifies and defines the connotation of sharing pricing by sorting out the commonalities of open sharing of bottleneck facilities in different types of natural monopoly industries.Sharing pricing exists in the process of natural monopoly industries providing bottleneck facility sharing services to competitors and consumers.Bottleneck fa-cilities are essential intermediate inputs owned by the incumbent enterprises for competitors to enter the market and for consumers to obtain the final products,which are irreplaceable in the short term and are not limited to physical network in-frastructure.Natural monopoly industries that provide sharing services refer to those that have four characteristics:bottle-neck facilities with capacity constraints,sharing objects with heterogeneous bottleneck facility usage rates,sharing ser-vices with low marginal costs,and sharing service markets that can be competitive.Competitors or consumers can obtain the right to use bottleneck facilities by paying the sharing price to incumbent enterprises,thereby participating in market competition or consuming final products.From the perspective of the sharing pricing goal,this paper continues the four main lines of Ramsey pricing,efficient component pricing rule,average cost pricing and,incremental cost pricing to summarize the research progress of sharing pricing strategies.The Ramsey pricing strategy considers the objectives of the incumbent enterprises'balance of pay-ments and maximization of social welfare,and formulates sharing prices based on the inverse demand elasticity principle.The efficient component pricing rule takes market efficiency as the first principle and uses the opportunity costs of the in-cumbent enterprise to provide sharing services as a key factor in designing sharing prices.The two pricing strategies rely on information about the elasticity of consumer demand for final products in downstream markets,which weakens their applicability in practice.The average cost pricing strategy is more practical,but may cause incumbent enterprises to lack incentives to upgrade bottleneck facilities.Adopting an incremental cost pricing strategy can provide incumbent enter-prises with incentive information to invest in bottleneck facilities,but it is difficult to accurately calculate the incremental costs in sharing services.Subsequently,this paper reviews the controversy over the implementation of sharing pricing regulation and deregula-tion and analyzes regulatory methods based on cost,price margin,and price cap.Implementing sharing pricing regulation can prevent incumbent enterprises from using sharing prices to hinder market competition and improve market efficiency,but it may lead to collusion between incumbent enterprises and competitors.Deregulation will allow incumbent enter-prises to use price tools to maintain their monopoly position,but it will guide them to increase investment in bottleneck fa-cilities.Whether to implement regulation or deregulation depends on the regulators'policy objectives,the market compe-tition,and the organizational structure of the incumbent enterprises.Cost-based regulation can produce higher social wel-fare,and price margin-based regulation can improve economic efficiency,while price cap-based regulation can promote market competition.Further,this paper explores the impact of sharing pricing from four aspects:market competition,universal service,investment in bottleneck facilities,and final product pricing.Different sharing pricing strategies,transparency,and price levels will change the expected benefits of incumbent and competitive enterprises,prompting them to adjust their produc-tion decisions and investment decisions in sharing services or final product markets,thus affecting market competition and investment in bottleneck facilities.Meanwhile,the sharing price will also affect consumers'willingness to choose to ob-tain final products through public bottleneck facilities,which determines whether universal services in natural monopoly industries can be realized.When consumers choose to obtain final products through public bottleneck facilities,enterprises will adjust their final product pricing policies in conjunction with sharing pricing policies to obtain higher profits.Finally,the future research direction of sharing pricing is proposed combined with the actual needs and potential trends of the development of natural monopoly industries.Research on sharing pricing has achieved rich results,but as natural monopoly industries and bottleneck facilities take on new forms,consumers play an increasingly important role,and there is no longer a perfect fit between existing research hypotheses and the characteristics in reality.In future re-search,scholars can fully consider the evolutionary characteristics of natural monopoly industries and bottleneck facilities as well as the new characteristics of consumers,enrich research methods such as theoretical modeling,policy simulation,and empirical analysis,and then more deeply explore sharing pricing strategies,regulation methods,and their impact.
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