دانلود رایگان مقاله پویایی بازار در رقابت های راه آهن

Abstract

On-rail competition is perhaps the most far-reaching form of deregulation of the railways, giving travellers several options on a single line. It aims to lower fairs and raise quality of service, thereby boosting demand and social welfare. Concerns have been raised, however, regarding if effective competition is possible on such a market, allowing two or more operators to be profitable and eliminating through incentives or regulation the purchase by one operator of the others’ access rights, thus restoring monopoly. In addition, the effect of competition on total welfare is unclear. The issue of how to regulate the market and conduct capacity allocation in order to maximise welfare is also as yet unanswered. Addressing these issues, the present paper studies a duopoly market through simulations. It builds on the hypothesis that competition occurs between trains with close departure times. Results indicate that total welfare increases significantly when going from profit-maximising monopoly to competition, as consumers make large gains while operators’ profits fall. The way the regulator allocates departure slots has significant importance for market outcomes, including prices, frequencies and total welfare. In particular, it is possible to improve welfare by regulating the succession of departures. If trading in access rights is allowed, a would-be monopolist has incentives to buy its competitors’ slots for a price they would accept. A monopolist that uses high frequency of departures as a deterrence strategy against competition increases frequency a lot compared to the profit-maximising level.

5. Conclusions

The model presented in this paper is built on the hypothesis that competition occurs between nearby departures. This has large implications for the results. It affects the operators’ best strategies, and hence it affects prices, profit, ridership and social welfare. It is clear that if the hypothesis is true, then any model that does not take account of it will fail to describe the market properly.

Results provided by the simulation model proposed in this article indicate that a stable equilibrium point with two independent operators exists on a railway market with on-rail competition, provided that it is possible through legal means to stop one operator from buying the other’s access rights. Profits do not decrease towards zero in this point.

If it is not possible to hinder operators from buying and selling access rights then there are incentives for one operator to buy all access rights at a price that its competitor would accept, thus restoring monopoly.

Social welfare increases when competition successfully replaces profit-maximising monopoly. This result is less stable if one looks only at the domestic part of social welfare however, as profits that previously stayed in the country may be transferred abroad when operators are not government-owned.

Attempts by the regulator to recover high profits to state coffers by introducing high infrastructure charges lowers total welfare, as it pushes operators to a new equilibrium point in the frequency game, with fewer departures and higher fares.

The equilibrium tends to be asymmetrical in the sense that one operator offers a substantially larger number of departures than the other, while selling tickets at higher prices. Noteworthy is that this result appears even when operators’ preconditions are perfectly symmetric, that is when excluding the effects of reputation with customers, efficiency of sales channels, quality of service and economies of scale and scope.

Welfare maximum under price competition is symmetric, to the contrary. It is optimal when operators offer equally many departures. This constrained optimum may not be possible to reach through regulatory means however. Policies studied in this paper that are designed to produce equally many departures end up either failing through not providing sufficient incentives for the smaller operator to raise frequency, or damaging total welfare by lowering combined frequency or raising average fares.

If the frequency game results in Stackelberg equilibrium, this benefits both operators compared to the Nash equilibrium. Total welfare is lower in the Stackelberg equilibrium point however.