One important issue facing reformers considering the restructuring of the seaports and freight railways sectors of a developing country is the creation of competition - or, alternatively, avoiding the creation or preservation of monopoly power. In seaports a crucial distinction is often that...

We survey the literature on the effects of public sector outsourcing. Guided by theory, we systematically arrange services according to the type and magnitude of their contractibility problems. Taken as a whole, the empirical literature indicates that public sector outsourcing generally reduces...

We survey the literature on the effects of public sector outsourcing. Guided by theory, we systematically arrange services according to the type and magnitude of their contractibility problems. Taken as a whole, the empirical literature indicates that public sector outsourcing generally reduces...

Any competitive process selects among qualities possessed by the competitors, and with different processes selecting for different qualities. While the competitive form is universal, the substantive qualities that are selected depend on the particular environment within which competition occurs....

We provide a theoretical justification for bi-sourcing, which refers to thesituation where a final goods producer buys an input from an outside supplier and alsoproduces it in-house. Bi-sourcing occurs if the marginal cost of producing the input inhouseis higher than the marginal cost of outside...

Tournament incentive schemes offer payments dependent on relative performance and thereby are intended to motivate agents to exert productive effort. Unfortunately, however, an agent may also be tempted to destroy the production of his competitors in order to improve the own relative position....

If a monopolist (any manufacturer with downward-sloping demand) cannot commit to a wholesale price in advance, even competitive retailers will be reluctant to enter the market, knowing that once they have entered, the monopolist has incentive to choose a higher price and reduce their...

Teamwork and cooperation between workers can be of substantial value to a firm, yet the level of worker cooperation often varies between individual firms. We show that these differences can be the result of labor market competition if workers have heterogeneous preferences and preferences are...

Tournament incentive schemes offer payments dependent on relative performance and thereby are intended to motivate agents to exert productive effort. Unfortunately, however, an agent may also be tempted to destroy the production of his competitors in order to improve the own relative position....

The emerging literature on interaction between strategic trade theoryand privatisation uses a simple example to argue that the irrelevanceresult is invalidated if the domestic market is open to foreigncompetition.This paper uses a fairly general framework to show that anythinga regulated...