Tender auctions with existing operators bidding
Vincent van den Berg and
Jan Rouwendal
Economics of Transportation, 2016, vol. 6, issue C, 1-10
Abstract:
Consider a government tendering a facility, such as an airport or railway, when one of the bidders is an ‘existing operator’ who owns another facility that is a substitute or complement to the tendered facility. In ‘standard auctions’, bidders compete on how much to pay to the government. We find that, all else equal, the existing operator offers to pay more than a ‘new bidder’ and the operator is therefore more likely to win the auction. In consumer-price auctions, bidders compete on the price they will charge. New bidders offer to set the price at their marginal cost. With complements, the existing operator strategically offers a price that is below its marginal cost; with substitutes, it offers a price that is above its marginal cost. Price auctions are better for welfare than standard auctions: they lead to lower mark-ups and are less affected by having an existing operator in the auction.
Keywords: D44; L13; L51; R48; Tendering; Existing operator; Network markets; Price auction; Infrastructures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212012216300107
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: Tender Auctions with Existing Operators Bidding (2013) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecotra:v:6:y:2016:i:c:p:1-10
DOI: 10.1016/j.ecotra.2016.05.001
Access Statistics for this article
Economics of Transportation is currently edited by Mogens Fosgerau and Erik Verhoef
More articles in Economics of Transportation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().