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Research undertaken at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has identified whether consumers are likely to switch supplier, whether they are likely to get a good deal, and how companies are likely to respond to specific regulatory intervention. Such research findings challenge regulators to make better decisions. An appropriate regulatory framework leads to better decisions by consumers, helping markets to work better, and resulting in lower prices and bills. This is particularly critical in the energy and water sector, which are of crucial importance to each of the 25 million households in the UK, and where implementation of some of these research findings could lead to reductions of 6% in household energy bills (which translates to a total saving of over £2.1 billion a year).
Professor Michael Waterson demonstrated how two consumer activities — search and switching — are necessary if competition is to benefit consumers. He showed how search and switching costs inhibit the competitive process; highlighted how firms increase these costs in retail, banking, insurance and energy markets, and recommended government measures to empower consumers. Regulators around the world have used Waterson's research to enhance the consumer benefits from competition. Professor Gregory Crawford also analysed switching costs, estimating the costs of automatically renewable contracts in the UK telephone market. Based on this analysis, Ofcom banned rollover contracts for all residential and small business customers of voice telephone and broadband services, reducing households' and small businesses' switching costs by at least £340 million/year.
Prof. Andrew Fearne's consumer insight research project influenced marketing practice in almost 400 farming and small food businesses, while helping eight food industry associations and regional development agencies meet their remits. It also supported local supplier initiatives at the UK's largest supermarket, Tesco. A recent participant survey showed that 89% of farmers and small food producers who engaged with the project found that the consumer insight was either `quite' or `extremely useful'. Meanwhile, the project helped Tesco grow its sales of local food and drink from £0.5 billion (2005) to over £1 billion (2012) against average retail sales growth of less than 5% per year over the same period (Office of National Statistics).
Telstra is an Australian telecommunications company. In the late 1990s, Telstra was faced by a new entrant, which would be competing against it with modern technology and a lower cost structure. Telstra needed to know how much share it would lose to undertake its resource planning. More importantly, Telstra also had to understand which customers it could retain and the actions it needed to take to retain them in terms of service design and delivery, pricing, and communications.
The underpinning research was conducted in conjunction with Telstra, and met their needs. This project generated published academic research output, and in parallel had a valuable impact on the client company. This impact was estimated, by Telstra, to exceed US$146 million.
In summary: this study reports research that was prompted by the direct need of a potential beneficiary, and which successfully achieved a signifb01cant fb01nancial impact for that beneficiary.
A body of research has informed government bodies, policy makers and other agencies on consumer interactions with retail financial services markets. Specifically, it has informed formulation of new policies in the area of simple products and banking standards that are now being put into effect as new policy initiatives.
The impact detailed here has been on policy development and implementation in the area of consumers and financial services. The body of academic research has gained traction and credibility with relevant stakeholders due to academic endorsement and wide scale dissemination efforts. This has allowed researchers a significant input into consultation processes, campaigns and a parliamentary commission. Such inputs have helped formulation of new policies in the area of simple products and banking standards that are now being operationalized as new policy initiatives. Thus, a direct chain of impact exists between the initial research and the final outcomes, which influences numerous financial services decision makers and banking customers.
From the 1990s UCL Economics invested in the capacity to conduct fundamental and applied research in behavioural and experimental economics. This was the basis for the research which provided the evidence base for the Office of Fair Trading to identify and act upon misleading pricing practices, particularly `drip pricing', in 2010. As a result, 12 major airlines announced that they would include debit card charges in their headline prices, and government announced that the EU-wide Consumer Rights Directive would be implemented a year earlier than it was due to go into effect.
The banking crisis that followed the collapse of Northern Rock in 2007 resulted in an urgent need to inject liquidity into the financial system. In order to resolve these issues, the Bank of England asked Professor Klemperer, an expert in auction theory, to help re-dseign its long-term market operations to allow the Bank of England to auction loans backed by financial collateral of varying quality. Since 2010, this has been adopted as the Bank of England's standard mechanism for its long-term repurchase operations. The potential impact of the new auction design extends beyond the Bank of England to other central banks, private industry and to industry regulators.
Competition authorities (CAs) such as the Office for Fair Trading (OFT) are obliged to evaluate how their activities have benefited consumers. On the basis of his prior research in this area, Stephen Davies was invited to produce a public evaluation of methods used by the OFT to estimate the direct consumer benefits resulting from its competition enforcement. This is an obligation to HM Treasury and influences the allocation of resources to, and within, OFT. His published report (2010) has led to changes in OFT's methodologies and has been influential on CAs internationally. It also feeds into how OFT conducts future interventions.
Essential services such as energy and water supply have, over the past three decades, been privatised by the British government with some reported negative results. One problem which became severe after privatisation is how to combine competitive markets with access to essential services because consumers in vulnerable circumstances find it difficult to obtain the best deals and good service. This research has helped regulators, policy makers and the energy and telecommunications industries to improve their understanding of the needs of the consumers in vulnerable circumstances and to develop policies and practices which take into account the multiple dimensions of vulnerability.