In the French urban public transport industry, services are often delegated to a private firmby the mean of a fixed-term regulatory contract. This contract specifies the duties of thefirm and a financial compensation. When it expires, a new contract is awarded, possibly toa different operator....

In this paper, we present a bounding methodology that allows to compute a tight lower boundon the cycle time of fork--join queueing networks with blocking and with general service timedistributions. The methodology relies on two ideas. First, probability masses fitting (PMF)discretizes the...

In this paper, we propose an example of successive oligopolies where the downstream firmsshare the same decreasing returns technology of the Cobb-Douglas type. We stress thedifferences between the conclusions obtained under this assumption and those resultingfrom the traditional example...

In this article we analyze firms investment incentives in liberalized electricity markets. Sinceelectricity is economically non storable, it is optimal for firms to invest in a differentiatedportfolio of technologies in order to serve strongly fluctuating demand. Prior to theLiberalization of...

We investigate the role of the transport sector in structuring the location of economic activitywithin two-region economic geography models of the footloose capital and core-peripherytypes. In our setting, competitive carriers offer transport services for shipping manufacturedgoods across...

We analyze the impact of a uniform price cap at electricity spot markets on firms investmentdecisions and on welfare. Since investment decisions for those markets are taken in the longrun, fluctuating demand at the spot market eventually gives rise to high price spikes in case ofbinding...

This paper analyses price competition under product differentiation when goods are defined ina two dimensional characteristic space, and consumers do not know which firm sells whichquality. Equilibrium prices consist of two additive terms, which balance consumers' relativevaluation of goods'...

In this paper we address the following question: is it more profitable, for an entrant in a differentiatedmarket, to acquire an existing firm than to compete? We illustrate the answer by considering competition inthe banking sector.....

The paper examines the Porter and induced-innovation hypotheses in a firm model where: (i) the firmhas a vintage capital technology with two complementary factors, energy and capital ; (ii) scrappingis endogenous; (iii) technological progress is energy-saving and endogenous through purposive...

This paper faces two questions concerning Joint Ventures (JV) agreements. First, we studyhow the partners contribution affect the creation and the profit sharing of a JV when partners'effort is not observable. Then, we see whether such agreements are easier to enforce when thedecision on JV...