In Germany, competitive franchising is increasingly being used to procure passenger railway services that were previously provided by a state monopolist. This paper analyzes 77 tenders that differ with respect to network size, service frequency, contract duration and the proximity to other lines...

The aim of this paper is to examine the feasibility of identifying an appropriate rail scarcity charge which would make operators pay for their use of rail capacity in line with the opportunity cost of the use of these slots and to give some idea of the likely effects of such charges. The way in...

The Stockholm – Arlanda airport rail link is a public-private partnership opened for traffic in 1999. This paper addresses costs and benefits of giving a private company control over one section of the otherwise public railway network. The project has reduced the pressure on the public...

The Shellpot Bridge is a 536-foot swing bridge located on a rail freight bypass route around Wilmington, Delaware. When the bridge failed in 1994, Conrail, then the bridge’s owner, elected not to repair it due to declining freight volume. The State of Delaware reached agreement with the new...

This paper covers network investment problems under decentralized control of regulation, infrastructure ownership and management. The model features two countries managing domestic infrastructures, used simultaneously for downstream international service provision. Initially, the welfare losses...

The purpose of this paper is to compare price and capacity competition in simple serial and parallel transport networks, where individual links are operated by different authorities. We find more tax exporting in serial transport corridors than on parallel road networks. The inability to toll...

We describe a pair of empirical tests that can be used to evaluate the technological feasibility of separating a vertically integrated network monopoly into a common infrastructure component and competing operating components. We implement the tests with a Generalized McFadden cost function that...

A postal regulator typically faces two issues which make the design of efficient access pricing especially difficult and which complicate the process of liberalizing the industry. First, universal service obligations, together with the presence of fixed costs, require retail prices to depart...

Suppose a multi-national agency can set minimum standards for the postal USO that apply to the countries under its jurisdiction, and that each country is required to comply with, or exceed, these standards. We examine the trade-offs that ensue across countries in designing an efficient USO at...

In a fully liberalized postal market, two business models will be possible for a new postal operator: (1) access: where the firm performs the upstream operations and uses the incumbent’s network for final delivery and (2) bypass where the competing firm controls the entire supply chain and...