Competitive rail regulation rules - Should price ceilings constrain final products or inputs?

There is no prospect at present that railroad rates in the United States wi ll be deregulated and left entirely to the control of market forces. Becaus e of this there is a need for defensible regulatory rules to be adopted. Th e authors consider the US regulatory rules of constrained market pricing wi th particular reference to the pricing of final products (namely, origin to destination rail transport) and the pricing of a bottleneck. They conclude that economic efficiency, and through it the public interest, is served mo st effectively by rules that impose the: same behaviour that market forces would impose on firms if those forces were present.