This paper explores airline pricing behaviour dealing with two issues. The fi…rst is to measure the extent to which intramodal competition infl‡uences fares charged to travellers. The second is to shed light on fares ’intertemporal pro…file to verify if airlines undertake intertemporal price discrimination (IPD) strate- gies and whether IPD is of monopolistic-type or competitive-type. Differently from past contributions, we study airline pricing behaviour removing the influence of intermodal competition. To this scope, we focus on the southern Italian market since it is less accessible by other modes of transport, hence airline pricing strategies are the straight results of air-related competition. Our results claim that when the intramodal competition reduces, airlines apply higher fares as they exploit the greater market power arising from more concentrated market structure. Further, we fi…nd evidence that airlines do undertake IPD strategies - the intertemporal pro…le of fares follows a J-curve - but that they do so in more competitive markets.

Over recent years, parking policy has become a key element of urban transport policy and planning in many countries. The need of urban mobility, mostly guaranteed by private cars, in facts, impacts on the policy and regulations of parking areas. The issue is particularly relevant for work related regular trips. Workers have an inelastic demand for parking spaces and limited alternatives to private transport. Often working places have a car parking area to satisfy workers needs but when this is not provided, it implicitly conditions workers? behaviours. The aim of this research is to analyse the trade-off between parking space availability and cost, in terms of time savings (considering time in terms of foregone earnings). This information is pivotal when designing parking policies in terms of fares, investments and regulation. The cost-opportunity of saving time, having information on the availability of slots closer to the working place, is conditioned by the worker?s income and earnings. Since the pivotal work of Axhausen and Polak (1991), a relevant body of literature has focused on parking behaviour, measuring many different dimensions in terms of travellers? choice of parking type and location. However, the little attention has been devoted to understand how risk and uncertainty influence drivers? behaviours in parking decision. This paper presents two studies addressing this issue. Both aims to collect disaggregate data on travellers? responses to changes in parking attributes and related information. Different components of the parking activity (e.g., general in-vehicle time, parking search time, egress time) are controlled for, in relation to the characteristics of the respondent. In order to avoid heterogeneity in relation to journey purposes we focus on workers? mobility. The first study is carried out using a standard stated preference approach; the second is carried out in a laboratory through the set up of an experiment. The collected data is used to build simple model of consumer?s choice related to parking decision, taking explicitly into consideration both risk and uncertainty. Laboratory?s results are compared to the field-experiment?s outcome in order to identify potential significant differences and, where possible, with existing revealed and stated preference results.

Abstract: In this paper, we illustrate the results of an on-going research aiming to investi- gate whether there is a significant causal relationship between the psychological characteristics of transport service users and travel mode decision-making in cities. We have taken Palermo as case study, where a pilot survey has been conducted to collect psychometric data on travellers’ perceptions and attitudes along with stated preference mode choice observations concerning systematic mobility. About 150 individuals have been interviewed and we have analysed the resulting dataset through mode choice modelling and factor analysis. We have found out that, in addition to traditional cost and bene t attributes, urban travel behaviour is influenced also by individual perceptions and attitudes regarding some qualitative aspects of transport like flexibility, comfort, safety and its symbolic-affective nature. Moreover, age, gender, working condition and the number of young children have proved to be significant explanatory factors of respondents’ psychological pro les. This rst study supports the assumption that individual latent preferences do play a role in mode choice behaviour inside urban areas and has pointed out useful suggestions for a future re ned investigation of the subject.

We provide theoretical foundations for quality-adjusted price-cap regulation in industries where a regulated incumbent and an unregulated entrant offer vertically differentiated products competing in price and quality. We show that, whether or not the incumbent anticipates the reaction of the entrant, the optimal weights in the cap depend upon the market served by the entrant, despite the latter not being directly concerned by regulation. We further show that the cap is robust to small errors in the weights. Our findings point to the conclusion that, in partially regulated industries, regulators should use information about the whole sectors rather than on the sole regulated incumbents.

This paper applies the production framework associated with a mixture of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to evaluate the relative efficiency of port management across countries. Differently from previous studies, a three stage approach is adopted in order to identify the role of contextual factors on an input-by-input basis. It involves using DEA for evaluating efficiency in the I and in the III stage, and SFA, carried out through fixed-effect estimators, in the II stage. The latter for controlling the role of external environment in determining input-specific efficiency differentials across ports. The sample is composed of 30 ports observed over the period 1995–2009. The outcome of the DEA applied in the III stage shows that netting inputs of the impact of factors considered outside direct ports' managers control, relative performances of ports change significantly. Any evaluation procedure of port performance should take into account the effect of contextual variables, as identified not only through overall efficiency, but also through input performance.

This paper illustrates the first results of an ongoing research for developing novel methods to analyse and simulate the relationship between trasport-related air pollutant concentrations and easily accessible explanatory variables. The final scope of the analysis is to integrate the new models in traditional traffic management decision-support systems for a sustainable mobility of road vehicles in urban areas. This first stage concerns the relationship between the mean hourly concentration of nitrogen dioxide and explanatory factors like traffic and weather conditions, with particular reference to the prediction of pollution peaks, defined as exceedances of normative concentration limits. Two modelling frameworks are explored: the Artificial Neural Network approach and the ARIMAX model. Furthermore, the benefit of a synergic use of both models for air quality forecasting is investigated. The analysis of findings points out that the prediction of extreme pollutant concentrations is best performed by the integration of the two models into an ensemble. The neural network is outperformed by the ARIMAX model in foreseeing peaks, but gives a more realistic representation of the relationships between concentration and wind characteristics. So, it can be exploited to direct the ARIMAX model specification. At last, the study shows that the ability at forecasting exceedances of pollution regulative limits can be enhanced by requiring traffic management actions when the predicted concentration exceeds a threshold that is pretty high but lower than the normative one.

Il Sud soffre da sempre la carenza di un sistema di trasporto di mezzi e passeggeri efficiente. Le reti autostradali, stradali e ferroviarie versano in condizioni a dir poco disastrose, mentre il trasporto aereo compensa solo in parte queste mancanze, con rotte poco frequenti e collegamenti fra città e aeroporti perlopiù assenti. Va tutelato il diritto di tutti i cittadini alla mobilità e all’accesso ai servizi essenziali, ai mercati e alle informazioni; ed è per questo che un piano per le infrastrutture nel Mezzogiorno non può più essere rinviato.

Il Mediterraneo da tempo è divenuto centro focale degli scambi e dei flussi di merci a livello mondiale. A questa centralità, tuttavia, non corrisponde, in generale, un sistema di governance, una dotazione infrastrutturale e una ricchezza di servizi adeguati. La rilevanza di quest'area per lo sviluppo economico e sociale del Paese ha indotto la Società Italiana di Economia dei Trasporti e della Logistica a dedicare la sua XIII riunione scientifica annuale a questo tema. La riunione, che si è tenuta presso l'Università degli Studi di Messina il 16 e il 17 giugno 2011, ha consentito un serrato dibattito scientifico tra numerosi studiosi delle discipline connesse al settore dei trasporti e della mobilità sul tema del "Sistema dei trasporti nell'area del Mediterraneo". Il volume, che raccoglie alcuni dei contributi presentati selezionati dal comitato scientifico, offre una ampia gamma di visioni ed approcci scientifici differenti. Oltre agli aspetti economici e finanziari più strettamente connessi alle infrastrutture e ai servizi di trasporto, si trattano anche tematiche di carattere tecnico-ingegneristico, giuridico e di pianificazione territoriale.

We model a ferry market where passengers are heterogeneous in their valuation of waiting time and, unlike in previous studies, can take services from all operators. Analyzing their behaviour when two operators are active, each providing one service, we find that complex patterns of product differentiation emerge between two goods that (i) do not exactly correspond to the available services and (ii) display service frequencies as quality attributes. A (low-quality) basic good, coinciding with the cheaper service, attracts low-time-value passengers. A (high-quality) composite good, which is a bundle of the two available services, appeals to high-time-value passengers. Consequently, demand is positive for either operator so that an inefficient operator is not crowded out. In the specific case of a mixed duopoly, a price-aggressive public operator spans discipline over (but does not monopolize) the whole market; a soft one boosts "quality" (i.e., frequency) vis-à-vis a fraction of the population only, that is yet larger than under classical vertical differentiation. Policy-makers pursuing redistribution objectives should target the cheaper service, in general, privileging either a raise in its frequency (when it is low) or a cut in its price (when frequency is high), depending upon the group of passengers they wish to support.

In this paper we show that individual attitudes of road-carriers and their latent preferences toward specific freight service attributes do play a role in determining their mode choices. Specifically, we contribute to the empirical literature on freight agents' mode choice by exploring the role of the “perceived importance” of the most relevant service dimensions in determining the attractiveness of two alternatives to “all-road” transport: logistics terminals and road–sea intermodal services. This is carried out through a revealed/stated preference experiment and a mixture of logit framework. Our results support the hypothesis that operators' attitudes towards time,punctuality and risk of loss/damage can significantly enhance the explanatory power of the choice model,thus providing useful information for policy-makers to improve the regional freight mobility system. The “all road” option is preferred by hauliers concerned with the risk of loss/damage but it is,instead,disregarded by those assigning great relevance to punctuality. We also found substantial heterogeneity among respondents: larger firms tend to assign a lower value to time but a higher importance to the risk of loss/damage,especially if shipments are not frequent. In addition,the relevance of service reliability is higher the greater the load size. Finally, we find that the nature of the transported goods significantly influences the choices of operators: when consigning perishables, hauliers tend to prefer the flexibility of a road-related mode. Any policy aiming at fostering the growth of intermodal transport and logistics and to remove obstacles to implementing rationalisation policies in the field of freight transport should take account of these elements.

In this paper we measure technical efficiency in Research and Development (R&D) of Italian regions with the aim of understanding whether the variation in accessibility and transport infrastructure endowment across regions might be the cause of efficiency disparities. We use a semi-parametric method where in the first step we estimate bootstrapped efficiency scores through DEA. In the second step, efficiency scores are explained - using alternative estimation methods - in a regression model accounting for transport infrastructure variables as non-discretionary inputs. We show that well-developed transport infrastructures seriously improve R&D efficiency by facilitating connections and, thus, knowledge transfer.