In recent years, the OPEX-CAPEX-incentive-bias (short: CAPEX-bias) received renewed attention in regulatory practice. A CAPEX-bias occurs when the OPEX solution is the more efficient approach, but regulation sets distorted incentives to choose the CAPEX solution. This paper presents a promising...

Regulating seaports is difficult in general, even more so for the weak regulatory institutions common in developing countries. For this reason some countries have awarded these facilities via Demsetz auctions, to the port operator that bids the lowest cargo-handling fee. A major concern with...

A new legislation in the German electricity market requires the implementation of an incentive-based regulation within the next years. In such a regime either prices or revenuesare capped and grow with the inflation rate minus a factor, which accounts for productivitydifferences between the...

This paper provides a unified vision of a number of results that appeared in three separate streams of literature. The author emphasizes the strong parallelism between the results obtained in a number of papers that analyzed the relationships between price cap regulation, welfare maximization,...

This paper provides a unified vision of a number of results that appeared in three separate streams of literature. The author emphasizes the strong parallelism between the results obtained in a number of papers that analyzed the relationships between price cap regulation, welfare maximization,...

We analyze various regulatory regimes for electricity transmission investment in the context of a transformation of the power system towards renewable energy. We study distinctive developments of the generation mix with different implications on network congestion, assuming that a shift from...

In January 2009 Germany introduced incentive regulation for the electricity distribution sector based on results obtained from econometric and nonparametric benchmarking analysis. One main problem for the regulator in assigning the relative efficiency scores are unobserved firm-specific factors...

This paper finds that coherent regulatory policies can boost investment in network industries of OECD economies. Rate-of-return regulation is generally thought to result in overinvestment, while incentive regulation is believed to entail underinvestment. Yet, previous empirical work has...

This study examines the effect of yardstick regulation in Japan's gas distribution sector, especially focusing on its effect of reducing the adverse selection problem. The Japanese government has regulated the price of city gas supplies by a combination of fixed-price regulation and ex-ante...

A fully unbundled, regulated network firm of unknown efficiency level can untertake unobservable effort to increase the likelihood of low downstream prices, e.g. by facilitating downstream competition. To incentivize such effort, the regulator can use an incentive scheme paying transfers to the...