in the French urban public transport industry, operations are often delegated and periodically put out for tender. Thus, operators’ incentives to reduce costs come from both profit maximization during the current contract and from the perspective of contract renewal. We construct a dynamic...

The quality of electricity distribution is being more and more scrutinized by regulatory authorities, with explicit reward and penalty schemes based on quality targets having been introduced in many countries. It is then of prime importance to know the cost of improving the quality for a...

In liberalized network industries, entrants can either compete for service using the existing infrastructure (access) or deploy their own infrastructure capacity (bypass). In this paper, we demonstrate that, under the threat of bypass, the access price set by an unregulated and vertically...

The postal sector has undergone dramatic changes over the recent years under the double effect of ongoing liberalization and increased competition with alternative communication channels (e-substitution). As a result, the mail volume handled by the historical operator has declined sharply while...

In this paper we explain the apparent diversification discount of conglomerates without assuming inefficent-cross subsidisation through internal capital markets. Instead we assume that an internal capital market efficiently redistributes scare resources across a conglomerates divisions between...