This paper considers the choice between different approaches to contract for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure projects. The need to control for user costs over the life cycle of an asset is demonstrated to be a core aspect of contract design. The more likely it is that a...

This paper compares three European countries with long experience of competition in rail transport - Britain, Sweden, and Germany. Given the nature of the reforms undertaken, we would expect the British approach to be the most successful, with Sweden next and Germany least successful. But an...

The purpose of this paper is to describe Sweden's recent reforms to open the railway passenger markets to entry, and to address how the reforms have handled four critical issues for the success of the reforms: the allocation of infrastructure capacity; the provision of maintenance and terminal...

This paper considers the choice between different approaches to contract for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure projects. The need to control for user costs over the life cycle of an asset is demonstrated to be a core aspect of contract design. The more likely it is that a...

High speed is an important determinant of accidents for speeders as well as for other motorists. This paper develops a framework for analyzing instruments that encourage drivers to internalize the full consequences of their behavior with respect to choice of speed using Pay-As-You-Speed (PAYS)...

The capacity of railway tracks is a scarce commodity that is, by nature, more complex than many other commodities. This paper presents results from a series of economic testbed experiments on the performance of different auctioning mechanisms for allocating track capacity between competing...

The first part of the paper reports the results from a sequence of laboratory experiments comparing the bidding behavior for multiple contracts in three different sealed bid auction mechanisms; first-price simultaneous, first-price sequential and first-price combinatorial bidding. The design of...