Abstract

Economic theory claims that contracts renegotiation prevents from reaching the informationally constrained efficient solution that could have been obtained under full commitment. Assessing the cost of renegotiation compared to the full commitment scenario still remains an open issue from an empirical viewpoint. To address this question, we fit a structural principal-agent model with renegotiation on a set of contracts for urban transport services. The model captures two important features of the industry. First, only two types of contracts are used in practice (fixed-price and cost-plus). Second, subsidies are greater when a cost-plus contract was signed earlier on than following a fixed-price contract. We then compare a scenario with renegotiation and a hypothetical situation with full commitment. We conclude that the welfare gains from improving commitment would be significant but would accrue mostly to operators. Document type: Preprint

Abstract

International audience; The air transport sector is going to enter the European Trading Scheme in 2012. The regulation of CO2 emissions is costly for airlines and modifies the organization of their market. Our paper proposes an economic analysis in which the regulation but also CO2 emissions of airlines are modelled. We show that, in a perfect competition setting, the difference between passengers carried without regulation and when the regulation is considered is negative for the best-performing planes. However, for the less efficient aircraft, the implementation of the regulation entails a reduction of airlines activity, and therefore a low level of carbon emissions.