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...

We provide a general framework in which to determine the optimal penalty fee inducing the contractor to respect the contracted delivery date in public procurement contracts (PPCs). We do this by developing a real option model that enables us to investigate the contractor's value of investment...

Time overruns are common in public works and are not confined to inherently complex tasks. One explanation advanced in this paper is that bidders can undergo unpredictable changes in production costs which generate an option value of waiting. By exploiting the real-option approach, we examine...

This paper considers the supplier's strategic delivery lead time in a public procurement setting as the result of the firm's opportunistic behaviour on the optimal investment timing. In the presence of uncertainty on construction costs, we model the supplier's option to defer the contract's...

Drawing on the real-options theory we analyse bidding behaviour in a sealed-bid-first-score procurement auction where suppliers, facing variable production costs, must simultaneously report the contract price and the cost level at which they intend to perform the project. We show that this award...