IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cam/camdae/1348.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Determining the optimal length of regulatory guarantee: A Length-of-Contract Auction

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas Greve
  • Michael G. Pollitt

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges in the area of infrastructure investment is the provision of funding to finance activities. This paper presents an auction design which can reduce the financing cost of infrastructure investments by allowing the length of the regulatory funding period to be determined via an auction. The auction allows bidders to submit bids against a payment for periods of varying length. Thus instead of, for example, a fixed 20-year contract period, some bidders might want to bid for financing over a longer period, say 25 or 30 years. This can be desirable in terms of securing more favourable terms in the financial markets. Our auction design can secure efficiency and lower financing costs. Our auction is motivated by the auctions currently being undertaken by the UK energy regulator (Ofgem) for financing offshore transmission assets. Although the auction was designed with electricity transmission in mind, the auction could be used in other areas of infrastructure investments

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Greve & Michael G. Pollitt, 2013. "Determining the optimal length of regulatory guarantee: A Length-of-Contract Auction," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1348, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    • Handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:1348
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://wwecon.cam.ac.uk/research-files/repec/cam/pdf/cwpe1348.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Paul Klemperer, 2010. "The Product-Mix Auction: A New Auction Design for Differentiated Goods," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 8(2-3), pages 526-536, 04-05.
    2. Engel, Eduardo & Fischer, Ronald & Galetovic, Alexander, 1997. "Highway Franchising: Pitfalls and Opportunities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(2), pages 68-72, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Greve, Thomas & Teng, Fei & Pollitt, Michael G. & Strbac, Goran, 2018. "A system operator’s utility function for the frequency response market," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 231(C), pages 562-569.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ingebretsen Carlson, Jim, 2015. "An Approximate Auction," Working Papers 2015:19, Lund University, Department of Economics.
    2. Y. Biondi, 2011. "Cost of capital, discounting and relational contracting: endogenous optimal return and duration for joint investment projects," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(30), pages 4847-4864.
    3. Eduardo M.R.A. Engel & Ronald Fischer & Alexander Galetovic, 2003. "Privatizing Highways in Latin America: Is It Possible to Fix What Went Wrong?," Working Papers 866, Economic Growth Center, Yale University.
    4. Estrella Alonso & Joaquín Sánchez-Soriano & Juan Tejada, 2020. "Mixed Mechanisms for Auctioning Ranked Items," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(12), pages 1-26, December.
    5. Nicolas Campos & Eduardo Engel & Ronald D. Fischer & Alexander Galetovic, 2019. "Renegotiations and corruption in infrastructure: The Odebrecht case," "Marco Fanno" Working Papers 0230, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno".
    6. van den Berg, Vincent A.C. & Rouwendal, Jan, 2016. "Tender auctions with existing operators bidding," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 6(C), pages 1-10.
    7. Gentry, Matthew & Komarova, Tatiana & Schiraldi, Pasquale & Shin, Wiroy, 2019. "On monotone strategy equilibria in simultaneous auctions for complementary goods," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 109-128.
    8. Trujillo, Lourdes & Quinet, Emile & Estache, Antonio, 2000. "Forecasting the demand for privatized transport - What economic regulators should know, and why," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2446, The World Bank.
    9. Arozamena, Leandro & Weinschelbaum, Federico & Wolfstetter, Elmar G., 2018. "Procuring substitutes with (fine-tuned) first-price auctions," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 115-118.
    10. Mark Lijesen & Victoria Shestalova, 2007. "Public and private roles in road infrastructure: an exploration of market failure, public instruments and government failure," CPB Document 146, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    11. Caillaud, Bernard & Tirole, Jean, 2004. "Essential facility financing and market structure," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(3-4), pages 667-694, March.
    12. Max Bruche & Gerard Llobet, 2010. "Walking Wounded or Living Dead? Making Banks Foreclose Bad Loans," Working Papers wp2010_1003, CEMFI.
    13. Simon Finster, 2020. "Strategic Bidding in Product-Mix, Sequential, and Simultaneous Auctions," Economics Papers 2020-W03, Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
    14. Daniel Danau & Annalisa Vinella, 2013. "From fixed to state-dependent duration in public-private contracts," Economics Working Paper Archive (University of Rennes 1 & University of Caen) 201344, Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREM), University of Rennes 1, University of Caen and CNRS, revised Jan 2015.
    15. Fichtl, Maximilian, 2021. "On the expressiveness of assignment messages," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 208(C).
    16. Julian di Giovanni & Manuel García-Santana & Priit Jeenas & Enrique Moral-Benitoz & Josep Pijoan-Mas, 2022. "Government Procurement and Access to Credit: Firm Dynamics and Aggregate Implications," Working Papers 2233, Banco de España.
    17. Ingebretsen Carlson, Jim, 2016. "An Auction with Approximated Bidder Preferences - When an Auction has to be Quick," Working Papers 2016:12, Lund University, Department of Economics.
    18. David Martimort & Flavio Menezes & Myrna Wooders & DANIEL DANAU & ANNALISA VINELLA, 2015. "Public-Private Contracting under Limited Commitment," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 17(1), pages 78-110, February.
    19. Paul Dütting & Vasilis Gkatzelis & Tim Roughgarden, 2017. "The Performance of Deferred-Acceptance Auctions," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 42(4), pages 897-914, November.
    20. Patrick Aldridge & David Cimon & Rishi Vala, 2023. "Central Bank Crisis Interventions: A Review of the Recent Literature on Potential Costs," Discussion Papers 2023-30, Bank of Canada.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Auctions; Contracts; Investments; Regulation Classification JEL: D44; D86; E43;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions
    • D86 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Economics of Contract Law
    • E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:1348. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jake Dyer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/ .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.