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...

We study competitive awarding procedures of short haul railway passenger services in Germany from 1995 to 2011 by means of a newly collected data set. In particular, we use regression techniques to investigate the determinants of the number of bidders, the identity of the winning bidder and the...

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...

Regulating bidder participation in auctions can potentially increase efficiency compared to standard auction formats with free entry. We show that the relative performance of two such mechanisms, a standard first-price auction with free entry and an entry rights auction, depends...

Since 2011, very significant developments have occurred in the procurement and contracting of bus services in major Australian cities. After many years of ‘grandfathering’ (continuing rollover of negotiated contracts with long-established private operators), competitive tendering has been...

The regulation of infrastructure by the ACCC and other economic regulators in Australia is based around net present value estimation techniques. Recently, Monkhouse (2007), suggested that real options valuation would provide better incentives for investment in infrastructure, but did not...

This paper studies the impact that capital market imperfections have on the natural selection of the most efficient firms by estimating the effect of the pre- deregulation level of leverage on the survival of trucking firms after the Carter deregulation. Highly leveraged carriers are less likely...

This paper describes a practical application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the Flemish road transportation sector. The efficiency of 82 road transportation companies responding to a large-scale survey focused on horizontal cooperation is evaluated, based on two inputs and two outputs....

It is often assumed that government intervention is required to bring to fruition large scale infrastructure projects because the large initial capital outlays such projects require must be funded from the public purse. In Wheels of Fortune, Fred Harrison shows that large scale infrastructure...

Depot is the most important and crucial operating level unit in Road Transport Corporations. It is here that more than 80 percent of the total manpower and financial resources are invested. Profits and losses are usually determined at depot level on the basis of its operating results. In this...