Maintenance, service quality and congestion pricing with competing roads

This paper studies maintenance and tolling decisions by two competing private operators of roads that experience depreciation and congestion. Duopoly generally results in higher social costs not only than in the first-best optimum but also the second-best optimum in which roads can be maintained but not tolled. Duopoly as a rule performs best when roads have equal capacities and intrinsic qualities so that market power is balanced. It also performs better when maintenance and tolling decisions are made simultaneously rather than sequentially because firms in the sequential game curtail maintenance in the first stage in order to soften toll competition in the second stage. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.