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on Transport Economics |
| By: | Fabien Leurent (LVMT - Laboratoire Ville, Mobilité, Transport - IFSTTAR - Institut Français des Sciences et Technologies des Transports, de l'Aménagement et des Réseaux - UPEM - Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech) |
| Abstract: | To a client, taxi quality of service involves not only the riding time and comfort, but also the access time between the instants of booking (or readying oneself) and pickup. In turn, the access time depends on fleet size and the macroscopic patterns of service usage: demand volume and its spread in space, average ride time, transaction times. In this article, we investigate the formation of the access time and derive its economic consequences for a taxi service in an idealized city with ring shape and spatial homogeneity, hence circular symmetry. At the operational level, under given supply and demand conditions the access time stems from the number of busy vehicles, which obeys to a second-degree characteristic equation. This enables us to model fleet size as a function of target demand volume and access time. Taking then a broader perspective, demand is elastic to supply conditions including access time, ride time, transaction time and tariff fare. We model short-term traffic equilibrium and demonstrate the existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium state. Next, at the tactical level the service supplier sets up the fleet size and the tariff fare in order to satisfy an economic objective. We model medium-term supply-demand equilibrium under three regulation patterns of, respectively, (i) service monopoly and the maximization of production profit, (ii) system optimum and the maximization of social surplus, (iii) second best system optimum subject to a budgetary constraint. In each pattern, both the tariff fare and the access time are linked by analytical formulas to exogenous conditions about the territory, the demand and the cost function of service provision. Theoretical properties are obtained to compare the patterns under specific demand function with constant elasticity of volume to generalized cost: under constant elasticity of-2, the monopoly tariff and generalized cost are more than twice as large as their system optimum counterparts, and exact doubles of their second best optimum counterparts in the absence of fixed production costs. At the strategic level, the model can be applied to assess decisions on vehicle technology (motor type, driving technology) and on service location by the service supplier, as well as the regulation policies by public authorities. |
| Keywords: | Traffic Model,Stochastic Equilibrium,Availability Function,Supply-Demand Equilibrium,Monopoly Operation,Collective Optimum,Second-Best Optimum |
| Date: | 2019–02–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02047269&r=all |
| By: | Keith Head; Thierry Mayer |
| Abstract: | This paper estimates the role of country-variety comparative advantage in the decision to offshore assembly of more than 2000 models of 197 car brands headquartered in 23 countries. While offshoring in the car industry has risen from 2000 to 2016, the top five offshoring brands account for half the car assembly relocated to low-wage countries. We show that the decision to offshore a particular car model depends on two types of cost (dis)advantage of the home country relative to foreign locations. The first type, the assembly costs common to all models, is estimated via a structural triadic gravity equation. The second effect, model-level comparative advantage, is an interaction between proxies for the model's skill and capital intensity and headquarter country's abundance in these factors. |
| JEL: | F1 F23 |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25614&r=all |
| By: | Pierre Picard (CREST - Centre de Recherche en Economie et en Statistique - ENSAE ParisTech - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique); Jennifer Wang; Kili Wang (TKU - Tamkang University [New Taipei]) |
| Abstract: | The outsourcing of retail services is frequently at the origin of agency costs, associated with the discretion in the way retailers do their job. This is particularly the case when retailers and customers collude to exploit loopholes in the contracts between producers and customers. In this paper, we analyze how insurance distribution channels may a¤ect such misbehaviors, when car repairers join policyholders to defraud insurers. We focus attention on the Taiwan automobile insurance market by using a database provided by two large Taiwanese automobile insurers. The theoretical underpinning of our analysis is provided by a model of claims fraud with collusion and audit. Our econometric analysis confirms that fraud occurs through the postponing of claims to the end of the policy year, possibly by filing a single claim for several events. It highlights the role of car dealer agencies in the collusive fraud mechanism.. |
| Date: | 2019–02–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02045335&r=all |
| By: | Hoogervorst, R.; Dollevoet, T.A.B.; Maróti, G.; Huisman, D. |
| Abstract: | Delays are a major nuisance to railway passengers. The extent to which a delay propagates, and thus affects the passengers, is influenced by the assignment of rolling stock. We propose to reschedule the rolling stock in such a way that the passenger delay is minimized and such that objectives on passenger comfort and operational efficiency are taken into account. We refer to this problem as the Passenger Delay Reduction Problem (PDRP). We propose two models for this problem, which are based on two dominant streams of literature for the traditional Rolling Stock Rescheduling Problem. The first model is an arc formulation of the problem, while the second model is a path formulation. We test the effectiveness of these models on instances of Netherlands Railways (NS). The results show that the rescheduling of rolling stock can significantly decrease the passenger delays in the system. Especially allowing flexibility in the assignment of rolling stock at terminal stations turns out to be effective in reducing the delays. Moreover, we show that the arc formulation based model performs best in finding high-quality solutions within the limited time that is available in the rescheduling phase. |
| Keywords: | Rolling Stock Rescheduling, Disruption Management, Railway Optimization, Column Generation |
| Date: | 2018–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ems:eureir:114971&r=all |
| By: | Roberto Bonfatti; Yuan Gu; Steven Poelhekk |
| Abstract: | Africa's interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal resourse to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in West Africa across the 1965-2012 period. Controlling for geography and the endogeneity of democratization, we show that autocracies tend to connect natural resource deposits to ports, while the networks expanded in a less interior-to-coast way in periods of democracy. This result suggests that Africa's interior-to-coast roads are at least in part the result of suboptimal political distortions. |
| Keywords: | political economy, democracy, infrastructure, natural resources, development |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notgep:2019-04&r=all |
| By: | Bengtsson, Wenke Johanne |
| Abstract: | A modern and functioning infrastructure is the key to maintaining the competitiveness of economies. In many countries, however, there are serious gaps in the supply of infrastructure, not least due to public budget bottlenecks. Therefore, the importance of project financing of public infrastructure has strongly increased for theory and practice. Numerous failed projects show that the success of this financing structure depends above all on realistic risk assessment. For this, project risks need to be understood in their full complexity. This includes in particular the risk of investors and lenders to misperceive the uncertainty in the decision-making situation. Heuristics and cognitive bias can lead decision makers to under- and overvalue risks and rewards. The goal of this dissertation was thus to understand the use of unrealistic optimism among investors and lenders in infrastructure project finance to find ways to make the risk assessments more realistic, optimize spending, and contribute to closing the infrastructure finance gap. To achieve this a theoretical causal bias model of individual decision maker unrealistic optimism and a predictive model of company unrealistic optimism were developed and tested with a survey among 102 relevant decision stakeholders. A major finding is that unrealistic optimism influences risk assessment in the financing of European infrastructure projects. Company related factors, personal factors, and overconfidence influence this unrealistic optimism on individual level. Unrealistic optimism on company level is further influenced by the institutional structure and objective company characteristics. The findings of the dissertation result in significant theoretical and practical contributions by showing that unrealistic optimism is at least partly situational and not strictly rooted in the head of the decision maker no matter the circumstance. Companies can thus reduce unrealistic optimism of their employees by applying the right institutional structure and team setting. |
| Date: | 2019–02–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dar:wpaper:111610&r=all |