We provide a model of local railway passengers service able to account for the main specific characteristics of the sector under vertical separation. Afterwards, we use this model to carry out both a normative analysis of the operators’ investment decisions and an assessment of the welfare...

This work draws on the analysis of price regulation of water services in Italy, the so-called Metodo Normalizzato, to examine the issues related to the definition of a regulatory mechanism when the costs of providing the service depend on exogenous variables which are geographically...

When today’s actions can affect tomorrow's value of an asset and when the principal does not have access to hard information, either about productive activity or monitoring activity, two incentive problems must be simultaneously solved: first, the ‘ex-ante’ moral hazard problem of inducing...