Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Competition and efficiency of private toll roads

Contents:

Author Info

  • Xiao, Feng
  • Yang, Hai
  • Han, Deren
Registered author(s):

Abstract

As the provision of roads has become market driven, many intriguing issues have emerged, such as the strategic interactions among private firms in determining road supply and pricing in a network and, more importantly, the resulting inefficiencies when competition substitutes for government regulation. This paper studies both toll and capacity competition among private asymmetric roads with congestion in a network with parallel links. We find that oligopolistic competition yields higher tolls but lower construction capacities than the socially optimal levels and, as a result, the level of traffic congestion does not decline. Based on some widely used assumptions, we show that the usage or the congestion level of each road controlled by each private firm, represented by the volume-capacity (v/c) ratio, is independent of the other competitors' choices of capacities and tolls in the oligopolistic market. To quantify the inefficiency of the oligopolistic equilibria via higher tolls and less realized traffic demand, we establish the upper bound of the ratio of the social welfare between the competitive equilibrium and the social optimum. The inefficiency bound depends mainly on the marginal benefit of trip-makers and the realized traffic demand at equilibrium on the private roads. Exact bounds are given by considering both the worst and symmetric cases. Naturally, our results show that the distortion disappears when the oligopoly changes to perfect competition.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V99-4KGG1GF-1/2/99ee69043479a78a9017522dcc7b0e02
Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Transportation Research Part B: Methodological.

Volume (Year): 41 (2007)
Issue (Month): 3 (March)
Pages: 292-308

as in new window
Handle: RePEc:eee:transb:v:41:y:2007:i:3:p:292-308

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/548/description#description

Order Information:
Postal: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
Web: https://shop.elsevier.com/order?id=548&ref=548_01_ooc_1&version=01

Related research

Keywords:

References

No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. De Borger, Bruno & Proost, Stef, 2012. "Transport policy competition between governments: a selective survey of the literature," Open Access publications from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven urn:hdl:123456789/367099, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
  2. Yaron Hollander & Joseph Prashker, 2006. "The applicability of non-cooperative game theory in transport analysis," Transportation, Springer, vol. 33(5), pages 481-496, 09.
  3. Vincent A.C. van den Berg, 2012. "Auctions for Private Congestible Infrastructures," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 12-087/VIII, Tinbergen Institute, revised 19 Oct 2012.
  4. Vincent Van Den Berg, 2011. "The effect of private road supply on the volume/capacity ratio when firms compete Stackelberg in Road Capacity," ERSA conference papers ersa11p1203, European Regional Science Association.
  5. André de Palma & Robin Lindsey & Fang Wu, 2007. "Private operators and time-of-day tolling on a congested road network," THEMA Working Papers 2007-02, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:transb:v:41:y:2007:i:3:p:292-308

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wendy Shamier).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.