Browsing by Subject "Contracts"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Advancing Public Interest in Public-Private Partnership of State Highway Development
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation Research Services Section, 2011-02) Zhao, Zhirong (Jerry); Saunoi-Sandgren, Emily; Barnea, Avital
    Facing rapidly increasing demand for new or additional transportation capacity, many states are eagerly exploring public-private partnership (PPP) in state highway development, which may allow public agencies to access private project financing and specialized expertise, and thus save public investment, expedite project completion, or improve service quality and diversity. Nevertheless, the path of PPPs is not smooth. The confusion and controversy surrounding recent asset-monetization leasing concession cases in the US have led to widespread public concerns and legislative caution, in particular on the question of whether a PPP project is advancing the public interest. The purpose of this project is to study the public interest associated with PPPs, with the goal to maximize efficiency gains, mitigate potential risks, and address public concerns in launching and deploying PPPs in state highway development. In particular, we focus on three aspects of PPP consideration: (1) Understanding economic rationales of PPPs, (2) Legal and political aspects of PPP decision-making, and (3) Managerial issues in implementing PPP projects.
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    Essays on Supply Chain Finance
    (2016-10) Chen, Yibin
    This thesis contains essays addressing three different problems in supply chain finance, studying two important source of financing – trade credit and crowdfunding. In the first essay, we model a web-based retailer offering direct financing to its capital-constrained supplier who sells its products on a consignment basis. The supplier has access to bank financing and the retailer can specify debt-seniority. We show that if the retailer requires debt-seniority, then the supplier will use either bank or direct financing (but not both), and it may produce more than the first-best quantity. In contrast, if the retailer does not request seniority, the supplier may take both bank and direct financing, but it always produces less than the first-best quantity. We find that the retailer does not always prefer debt-seniority. In the second essay, we study variants of net-terms trade credit contracts in a traditional market, with market frictions of bankruptcy costs, information asymmetry and transaction costs. We provide a possible explanation for the prevalence of debt forgiveness in practice. We show that the supplier, by contracting and preannouncing forgiveness, can use one type of friction to mitigate another, and benefit both supply chain partners. The third essay studies the social proof effect in the rapidly diffused crowdfunding market. We study how prior capital accumulation and the volume of owner-issued referrals impact subsequent fundraising. By analyzing a campaign-level web traffic data set, we show that higher capital accumulation increases the probability of contribution for the owner-referrals, the volume of organic visitors and the total volume of organic contributors, although it may decrease probability of contribution from the organic visitors. To study the optimal policy for entrepreneurs to use their referrals, we build a Markov-decision-process model and calibrate its parameters using our data. Our finding indicates that entrepreneurs in general should distribute their referrals over the course of the entire campaign.