 levels in order to draw a disproportionate amount of compensation out of the common pool. The impetus to increase terminating access charges exists regardless of whether competition exists in local access or the terminating LEC is small. Indeed, small carriers may well have the greatest incentive to increase terminating access charges, because the percentage of the increase that their own customers pay will be disproportionately small. At the same time, such pricing behavior might give long distance carriers greater incentive to enter the local access market in order to avoid paying these charges (FCC 1999d). A number of mechanisms exist to solve this problem without mandating inter- connection. For example, the incentive to increase terminating access charges would disappear if the FCC were to mandate bill and keep. Indeed, any uniform access pricing regime would eliminate the ability of terminating LECs to take advan- tage of the common pool problem, although economic efficiency would ultimately depend on ensuring that access prices were set at competitive levels. In addition, LECs' incentive to increase terminating access charges could also be eliminated by mandating that terminating access charges be reciprocal, although reciprocity may have implications for entry (Laffont et al. 1997, 1998). Reciprocity is not as effective when LECs do not originate and terminate traffic in a roughly symmetrical manner, as illustrated by disputes over carriers that only serve customers that receive calls, such as Internet service providers, conference call companies, and chat rooms, as evidenced by the recent dispute over "traffic pumping."35 Finally, terminating 35 This dispute arose when a small group of rural Iowa LECs left the uniform tariffs established by the National Exchange Carrier Association and negotiated relatively high compensation rates designed to cover their costs at their historically low volumes. After establishing these rates, these LECs began to solicit customers offering services that only terminated c