Legal frameworks, especially in Europe, encourage private participation and competition in the management of public services. However, many local public authorities concentrate the various services they have in charge in the hands of a single operator, leading to horizontal integration which a...

French municipalities often contract out the provision of local public services to private companies, and regularly choose the same private operator for a range of different services. We develop a model of relational contracts that shows how this strategy may lead to better performance at lower...

This paper deals with efficient organizational choices for the provision of public services. To better apprehend observed contracts of public-private partnerships (ppps), we depart from the property rights literature to distinguish between ownership, rights to make ex post decisions, and rights...

Three organizational structures of local public services, namely Anglo-Saxon public-private partnership, ?delegation of public services?? as implemented in France, and public management, are analysed in this article through the incomplete contract theory approach. The role of the public...

Contractual incompleteness is generally defined by a trade-off between costs and benefits. We examine this trade-off in a dynamic setting and show how the ability of the parties to sustain a relational contract leads to more incomplete contracts.