Joint impact of competition,ownership form and economic regulation on airport performance and pricing

The combined impact of ownership form, economic regulation and competition on airport performance is analyzed using data envelopment analysis to measure cost efficiency in the first stage and regression analysis to measure the impact of the environment in the second stage. The empirical results of an analysis of European and Australian airports over a 10 year timeframe reveal that under relatively non-competitive conditions, public airports operate less cost efficiently than fully private airports. Irrespective of ownership form, regulation is necessary to emulate competitive forces thus pushing airport management towards cost efficiency and reasonable pricing policies. Under potential regional or hub competition, economic regulation inhibits airports of any ownership form from operating and pricing efficiently. Although public and fully private airports operate equally efficiently in a competitive setting, private airports still set higher aeronautical charges. Furthermore, mixed ownership forms with a majority public holding are neither cost efficient nor low price, irrespective of the level of competition.     

Integrated modeling of car/motorcycle ownership, type and usage for estimating energy consumption and emissions

Devising effective management strategies to relieve dependency on private vehicles, i.e. cars and motorcycles, depends on the ability to accurately and carefully examine the effects of corresponding strategies. Disaggregate choice models regarding the ownership, type and usage of cars and motorcycles are required to achieve this. Consequently, this study proposes integrated car and motorcycle models based on a large-scale questionnaire survey of Taiwanese owners of cars and motorcycles, respectively. Incorporating gas mileage and emission coefficients for different types of cars and motorcycles into the proposed models can enable the estimation and comparison of reductions in energy consumption and emissions under various management strategies. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed integrated models, scenarios involving 10% and 30% increases in gas prices are analyzed and compared. The results indicate that gas price elasticities of cars and motorcycles are low, ranging from 0.47 to 0.50 for cars and 0.11 for motorcycles. Additionally, a high ratio of discouraged car users shifting to use of motorcycles neutralizes the effects of increased gas price in reducing energy consumption and emissions. Pollution of CO and HC even slightly increased because motorcycles are much more polluting in terms of CO and HC. At last, the reductions of energy consumption and emissions under 10% and 30% increase (or decrease) in other manipulating variables are also estimated and compared. The countermeasures for reducing ownership and usage of cars and motorcycles are then recommended accordingly.     

Seaport investments in capacity and natural disaster prevention

Most seaports face constraints in financial resources to some degree, and thus need to balance the investments in capacity and natural disaster prevention. On the one hand, due to budget constraint, limited resources need to be allocated between the two tasks. On the other hand, the benefit of natural disaster prevention investment is likely to be higher for ports with larger capacity. This study builds a stylized analytical model to examine the managerial and policy implications of such interactions between the two counteracting mechanisms. We find that the port managers would always prioritize capacity investment over natural disaster prevention investment. Social welfare maximizing ports invest more in both capacity and disaster prevention than those chosen by profit maximizing operators. However, compared with profit maximizing ports, welfare maximizing ports also require a larger budget to justify the investment in disaster prevention. Moreover, with increasing intensity of natural disaster, a port’s capacity investment decreases and its disaster prevention investment increases, irrespective of its objective. The magnitudes of both changes are larger for welfare maximizing ports than for profit maximizing ports.     

Do the organizational forms affect passenger satisfaction? Evidence from Chinese public transport service

This paper presents a discussion on the relationship between organizational forms (including the ownership structure and the contractual practices) and passenger satisfaction of Chinese public transport service. To test this proposition, an original rich data set covering 4702 respondents and 58 public transport operators of 13 cities for the period 2013–2014 is used. We firstly estimate the passenger satisfaction based on customer satisfaction theory and PLS-SEM, and then take into consideration the mixed logit model to assess the effect between them. Conclusions drawn from the study are summarized as follows: ① The effect of organizational forms on the passenger satisfaction of public transport service is confirmed. ② Public transport services franchised to public ownership offer higher passenger satisfaction than those franchised to private ownership and mixed ownership. ③ Public transport services regulated by the management contracts incite more passenger satisfaction than those regulated by net cost contracts and gross cost contracts.     

Using census aggregates to proxy for household characteristics: an application to vehicle ownership

Traditionally, researchers studying transportation choice have used data either acquired from household surveys or broad, region-wide aggregates. At the disaggregate level, researchers usually do not have access to important variables or observations. This study investigates the potential usefulness of a proxy approach to modeling discrete choice vehicle ownership: substituting narrow area-based aggregate proxies for missing micro-level explanatory variables by accessing large, publicly maintained datasets. We use data from the 2000 Bay Area Travel Survey (BATS) and the contemporaneous U.S. Census file to compare three models of vehicle ownership, drawing area-wide proxies from increasing levels of aggregation. The models with proxies are compared with a parallel model that uses only survey data. The results indicate that the proxy models are preferred in terms of model selection criteria, and predict vehicle ownership as well or better than the survey model. Parameter values produced by the proxy method effectively approximate those returned by household survey models in terms of coefficient sign and significance, particularly when the aggregate variables are representative of their household-level counterparts. The proxy model with the narrowest level of aggregation achieved the best fit, coefficient precision, and percentage of correct prediction.