IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tse/wpaper/130478.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Collusion in Bidding Markets: The Case of the French Public Transport Industry

Author

Listed:
  • Gagnepain, Philippe
  • Martimort, David

Abstract

We explore empirically the impact of the market sharing collusive practices that were implemented in the French public transportation industry between 1994 and 1999. We build a structural model of bidding markets where innovating firms compete for the market and have the ability to spread the benefits of their innovation through all markets on which they are active. Each local competitive environment shapes the distribution of the prices (the bids) paid by public authorities to transport operators. We recover empirically the distribution of prices and innovation shocks and we show that collusive practices had overall a limited impact on prices. Firms were in reality more interested in avoiding significant financial risks inherent to the activity, as well as the high cost of preparing a tender proposal. As a by-product, we perform a counterfactual analysis that allows us to simulate how an increase in firms’ innovation reduces prices significantly.

Suggested Citation

  • Gagnepain, Philippe & Martimort, David, 2025. "Collusion in Bidding Markets: The Case of the French Public Transport Industry," TSE Working Papers 25-1631, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    • Handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:130478
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/wp/2025/wp_tse_1631.pdf
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bidding Markets; Market Sharing; Collusion; Innovation; Public Transport;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • L9 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:130478. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tsetofr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.