<title>Abstract</title> This paper retraces the origins of the unbundling of infrastructure, which is a monopoly, from services, which are subject to competition. Using the case of the railroad industry in France, I examine how both natural monopoly theorists and legislation dealt with this subject in the...

This article examines the railway concessions in France in the 19th century as examples of a principal-agent relationship between the State and a contractor. I show that one of the main assumptions of the agency theory, the asymmetric information at the benefit of the agent, is not verified. I...

In this article, I analyze and compare the contributions of Dupuit and Walras on the natural monopoly of railroads. Both theorists argued that railroads—as opposed to inland waterways—could not be vertically unbundled, a point that previous authors who compared their views failed to point...