Bill Olson co-authored a paper with postal economist Dr. John Haldi (of Haldi Associates, Inc.) entitled “Enhancing Competition By Unbundling the Postal Administration” which was published in Crew & Kleindorfer, Progress Toward Liberalization of the Postal and Delivery Sector, Springer Science+ Business Media, Inc., 2006, and presented at the Thirteenth Conference on Postal & Delivery Economics, Antwerp, Belgium, June 1 – 4, 2005. http://crri.rutgers.edu/post/index.html The paper presents a possible solution to a recurrent problem associated with reforming postal administrations.
“Attempts to bring the rigors of competition to postal authorities via de-regulation have stumbled repeatedly over the following dilemma: (i) the Universal Service Obligation (“USO”) has powerful political support; (ii)the postal monopoly is asserted to be necessary to assure funding of the USO; and (iii)a fully de-regulated government monopoly is unacceptable. The unbundling model presented in this paper offers a solution to this dilemma. Although scope of the existing monopoly over delivery would not be reduced by this proposal, unbundling the upstream portion of the network would reduce substantially the amount of resources protected by the monopoly, while preserving the USO.”