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This article examines the asymmetry that currently exists in South Africa in the regulatory treatment of customer data usage by mobile network operators (MNOs) and over-the-top (OTT) service providers. MNOs and OTTs must receive customer “consent”, in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI Act) and its Regulations, before sharing the customer’s “personal information” with a third party. But MNOs have an additional requirement to meet, in terms of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (RICA), which is not applicable to OTTs: a requirement whereby a customer must provide “written authorisation” to an MNO before the MNO can share “communication-related information which relates to the customer concerned” with a third party. In this article, I examine and analyse provisions of the POPI Act, POPI Act Regulations, RICA, other relevant legislation, court decisions, records of a Parliamentary hearing, the standard terms and conditions and privacy policies of two South African MNOs (Vodacom and MTN), and two international OTT service providers (Google and Facebook). Based on the analysis, I argue that the unequal regulatory treatment between the MNOs and OTTs, if allowed to persist, threatens to undermine the growth of key elements of South Africa’s digital economy.

Prior research has demonstrated that although organizations generally avoid uncertainties, this behavior is not universally true. To better understand the contingencies around organizations’ respon...

The feed-in tariff (FIT) program is a popular policy for incentivizing new renewable energy projects because it establishes a long-term contract with renewable energy investors. This paper presents a novel model to analyze a FIT contract with a minimum price guarantee (i.e., a price-floor regime) from an investor's perspective. The results show that a perpetual guarantee only induces investment for prices below the price floor when offering a risk-free investment opportunity. In contrast, the finite guarantee may induce investment even when the revenue from the guarantee is lower than the investment cost. When an investor faces a scenario with regulatory uncertainty, a higher and more likely reduction in the price floor induces earlier investment. For all cases, investors postpone an investment decision when market conditions present a higher price volatility. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved., The authors gratefully acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for the many useful suggestions that greatly improved this article. This work was supported by a PhD scholarship provided by Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the MIT Portugal program under project SFRH/BD/52086/2013, and was supported by national funds through Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UID/CEC/50021/2013. In addition, this work was carried out within the funding with COMPETE reference no POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006683 (UID/ECO/03182/2013), with the FCT/MEC's (Fundacao para a Cincia e a Tecnologia, I.P.) financial support through national funding and by the ERDF through the Operational Programme on "Competitiveness and Internationalization - COMPETE 2020" under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement.

Policy Sciences, 44 (1), ISSN:0032-2687, ISSN:1573-0891

Regulatory uncertainties have often posed a business risk to renewable energy investors. Energy regulations in Spain were recently revised in June 2014. The objective of this study is to analyze the 50 MW wind power project under revised framework. The project is evaluated using NPV with risk and real options method through Monte Carlo simulations. As a part of this study, five scenarios were evaluated. The base scenario, “Business As Usual (BAU)” consist of recent framework that was into place, just before the new regulation was announced. The other scenarios (including newly introduced framework) were compared to the BAU. We have focused on “delay” option for the current scope. The overall results of the study suggest a negative NPV under the revised framework, with significantly higher delay value. From the results, it is advisable to delay the project. The paper presents the policy implications under scenarios selected in the papers. The article also presents the policy implication for developing countries. The study also served as the learning for developing nations from European Union states.

The medical product sector is characterised by a regulatory patchwork of European and national laws and guidelines operating concurrently with each other. Each of these sectors are characterised by different levels of regulatory uncertainty that may undermine the effectiveness of the regulatory framework. How have European regulation shaped individual product sectors? How has that impacted regulatory uncertainty in that sector? What has been the impact of regulatory compliance? Drawing on documentary research and fieldwork interviews this pilot study conducted in Netherlands, finds that ATMPs and medical device sectors exhibit high level of regulatory uncertainty. Although the sources of uncertainty are varied across each of the sectors. In some instances when regulatory uncertainty have reached unmanageable levels, measures have been taken by regulators to address it. Regulatees themselves have developed a complex compliance strategy that allows them to tolerate and in certain circumstances even circumvent regulatory uncertainty

Top managers’ attention to new problems has important consequences for the firm and is often triggered by external factors such as regulatory uncertainty. In this research we draw from behavioral theories of uncertainty avoidance and managerial attention to examine how headquarter and subsidiary top managers allocate attention to a new problems with and without regulatory uncertainty. We find subsidiary top managers exhibit classic uncertainty avoidance by reducing attention to new problem in uncertain as compared to certain settings, while headquarter top managers increase their attention to new problems under regulatory uncertainty. We test these ideas using a setting where U.S. electric utility firms are attending to a relatively new sector: renewable electricity, from 2000 to 2010.