Contract design of private infrastructure concessions

The main purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the impacts of concession contract design on the performance of private infrastructure concessions. It demonstrates that the design of a concession contract can mitigate various potential problems arising from the contractual relationship for private infrastructure concessions in general, and private highway concessions in particular. The dissertation emphasizes a special subset of private infrastructure concessions, the build-operate-transfer (“BOT”) projects. The concession contract is central to BOT planning because it can be tailored to promote different privatization goals and ease project execution in different context environments. The dissertation begins with an empirical survey of a wide range of procurement procedures and contract provisions used in designing infrastructure concessions. These procedures and provisions are tools available to the government for controlling the private concessionaire's behavior and aligning it with its own objectives. The dissertation shows that the diversity and complexity of these contracts can be understood in terms of three fundamental problems: asymmetrical information, incredible commitment, and contract incompleteness. Concession contracts are designed to address these problems as they appear in differing degrees in each contract environment. Next, the decision-making process of BOT projects is rigorously modeled as a game played between the government and concessionaire. The purpose of this modeling is to investigate how key project decisions are made, how they interact with important characteristics of the project, and what their impact is on project performance. This modeling is proven to be highly flexible and yields insights as to the key instruments of contract design. It is applied to study both traditional and innovative private highway contractual schemes. This modeling enables us to compare the performance of different schemes on a consistent basis.; The contract analysis approach employed in the dissertation takes into account both incentive and risk factors of a BOT project and provides a comprehensive perspective conducive to innovative win-win solutions for designing concession contracts. Therefore, this research not only helps government agencies realize their policy objectives, but also assists private project developers to succeed in winning infrastructure projects.