Essays on the Economics of Parking and Mixed Oligopoly

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1857560 (Table of Contents)

This dissertation comprises of three chapters. In the first chapter, we investigate the existence of self-financing and Pareto-optimal parking pricing scheme by devel- oping a simple static model in which travelers, differing in terms of the value of time, optimally choose between the car and public transit as well as trip duration. To curb congestion, public authorities charge parking fee per unit of time. We derive condition(s) which may ensure the pricing scheme to be both Pareto-optimal and self-financing in the sense that no external funds are required. Numerical results, when the value of time follows some specific rational functional form have also been reported that guarantees the existence of Pareto-optimal and self-financing price scheme. In the second chapter, we contribute to the literature on endogenous tim- ing in a mixed duopoly, where a public firm is competing against a domestic private firm, by exploring the role of information advantage by a firm to act as a market leader in a quantity setting game. We find that under asymmetric information, both type of Stackelberg equilibria with either firm acting as a leader coexist only for the low variance of the demand shock. However, under high variance, only one of the firms acquires costly information which helps it to endogenously act as a market leader. In the third chapter, we allow the public firm to have a foreign-owned private competitor. We find that when the foreign-owned private firm is informed, multiple equilibria co-exist and under high uncertainty only the public firm acquires costly information and endogenously acts as a market leader.