The quality of electricity distribution is being more and more scrutinized by regulatory authorities, with explicit reward and penalty schemes based on quality targets having been introduced in many countries. It is then of prime importance to know the cost of improving the quality for a...

In the postal sector, the net cost of universal service depends on the content of the service, the postal market characteristics and the country’s geographical configuration. These three groups of factors affect both the direct cost of providing the service and the extent of competition on the...

Postal markets have been open to competition for a long time. But, with a few exceptions, the competitors of the incumbent postal operator are active on the upstream segments of the market -preparation, collection, outward sorting and transport of mail products. With the further steps planned in...

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

The imposition of universal coverage and uniform pricing constraints, as part of the universal service obligations, makes the universal service provider less aggressive in the price game when it competes with a rm that does not cover the whole set of markets (Valletti et al., 2002). In this...

In this paper we are interested in the organization of long-term care within a given population. Three care financers are identified: the family, the government and the care receiver who can buy a dependency insurance. Our interest lies in the effect of governmental intervention on the...

In a repeated interaction between and a principal and two agents with inter-agents externalities and asymmetric information, we show that optimal decentralization within the organization is limited to the first period and across agents.