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....

Disappointment with insider trading in Russia, with voucher privatization in the Czech Republic, and with the privatization of infrastructure in many developing countries has spawned new critiques of privatization. How do theory and empirical evidence answer the much-debated questions, Which is...

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....

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...

From an employer's perspective a tournament should induce agents to exert productive activities but refrain from destructive ones. We experimentally test the predictive power of a tournament model which suggests that within a reasonable framework productive and destructive activities are not...

This paper tests whether product market competition affects vertical integration through the price channel. The identification strategy exploits data on ownership structure and deregulation of the US railroad sector as a source of exogenous variation in competition within the coal mining...

From an employer's perspective a tournament should induce agents to exert productive activities but refrain from destructive ones. We experimentally test the predictive power of a tournament model which suggests that - within a reasonable framework - productive and destructive activities are not...