Aligning Technological and Institutional Change : Maritime Transport in West Mediterranean Sea

Within the field of study of infrastructure, several works have addressed the issue of the coherence between technology and institutions of network industries. In a dynamic perspective, issues arise about how technology and institutions co-evolve, what stimulates improvement of infrastructure performance, and how formal institutions should be designed in order to facilitate technical and institutional co-evolution and the improvement of infrastructure performance. Through the study of the case of maritime transport industry in West Mediterranean Sea, this paper aims to contribute to the refinement of the technical-institutional coherence framework by suggesting that more attention should be placed on the role played by perceptions of current and expected performance of infrastructure, on the process through which higher coherence between the technical and institutional systems is achieved, and on the conditions that make agents more likely to exert efforts to improve the coherence between technical and institutional systems of infrastructure