We consider an environment where two education institutions compete by selecting the proportion of their funding devoted to teaching and research and the criteria for admission for their students, and where students choose whether and where to attend university. We study the relationship between...

In this paper we discuss the role of commercial non-profit firms in the provision of public services, referring to three case studies to illustrate the main issues. We consider problems of corporate governance, including the role of the board of members and the scope for performance-related pay....

We model public-private partnerships in building and managing facilities for the provision of public services. In particular, we analyze both the desirability of bundling the building and management operations, and the optimal allocation of ownership between the public sector and private firms....

In this paper we discuss procedural and contractual aspects of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in Italy, in the light of the economic theory of contracts and of incentives. We emphasize the potential role for PPPs for infrastructure development in Italy and the inefficiencies that arise in...

This paper examines the effects of a competitive fringe on a regulated firm. Using Hart's (1983) model, we show that competition weakens the managerial incentives for cost reduction: when there is correlation between the cost levels of the firms in the industry, costs are higher in the regulated...

We build a unified theoretical framework to analyze the main incentive issues in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and the shape of optimal contracts in those contexts. We present a basic model of procurement in a multitask environment in which a risk-averse agent chooses unobservable efforts...

To what extent does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better economic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works, by combining contract-level data on procurement performance and bureau-level data on competence and...

This paper addresses the issue of how to organize a two-product industry with interdependent demands when the regulator cannot observe the demand level of the goods produced. Two industry structures are compared: a multiproduct monopoly, in which an informed firm produces both goods, and a...

We use an incomplete-contract approach to compare contracting out by a public sector agency with the delegation of contracting out to a public-private partnership (PPP) that is a joint venture between private and public sector agents. The PPP maximizes a linear combination of profit and social...

We provide a new rationale for commercial activities by non-profit organizations (NPOs) whose primary concern is to supply mission output. We show that investment in commercial activity may be used to insure mission output against the uncertainty of donations, though possibly at the cost of...