Quality incentives and quality outcomes in procured public transport - Case study Stockholm

Kjell Jansson and Roger Pyddoke

Research in Transportation Economics, 2010, vol. 29, issue 1, 11-18

Abstract: Gross contracts appear to be the most common contract form for procured public transport in Sweden and elsewhere. This contract form, it has been argued, gives weak incentives for operators to deliver the desired quality level. Therefore many procuring public transport authorities amend contracts with quality incentives. This paper examines how such quality incentives influence quality outcomes with focus on cancelled departures and delays. The main findings are that the introduction of quality incentives are correlated with both increases and decreases of measured quality outcomes. We hypothesise that the results are driven by underlying cost changes for achieving desired quality objectives that exceed the possible revenues from the incentives. In interviews with the Stockholm public transport authority (SL) and some operators, two central observations surface. The first is that there are causes for quality failures that are not solely the responsibility of operators and that these are therefore not fully reached by the incentives, and the second is that the operators believe that they have exhausted what they can do under the current contracts.

Keywords: Gross; contracts; Quality; incentives; Quality; outcomes; Stockholm; public; transport; authority (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0739-8859(10)00034-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:retrec:v:29:y:2010:i:1:p:11-18

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_2&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Transportation Economics is currently edited by M. Dresner

More articles in Research in Transportation Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().