Università della Svizzera italiana

Competitive tendering versus performance-based negotiation in Swiss public transport

Filippini, Massimo ; Koller, Michael ; Masiero, Giuliano

In: Transportation research part A: policy and practice, 2015, vol. 82, p. 158-168

The purpose of this study is to assess differences in the levels of cost efficiency of bus lines operated under competitively tendered contracts and performance-based negotiated contracts. Following the revision of the Swiss railways act in 1996, regional public authorities were given the choice between two different contractual regimes to procure public passenger transport services. We...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Competitive tendering versus performance-based negotiation in Swiss public transport

Filippini, Massimo ; Koller, Martin ; Masiero, Giuliano

The purpose of this study is to assess differences in the levels of cost efficiency of bus lines operated under competitively tendered contracts and performance-based negotiated contracts. Following the revision of the Swiss railways act in 1996, regional public authorities were given the choice between two different contractual regimes to procure public passenger transport services. We...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Effects of ownership, subsidization and teaching activities on hospital costs in Switzerland

Farsi, Mehdi ; Filippini, Massimo

In: Health economics, 2008, vol. 17, no. 3, p. 335-350

This paper explores the cost structure of Swiss hospitals, focusing on differences due to teaching activities and those related to ownership and subsidization types. A stochastic total cost frontier with a Cobb-Douglas functional form has been estimated for a panel of 148 general hospitals over the six-year period from 1998 to 2003. Inpatient cases adjusted by DRG cost weights and ambulatory...

Università della Svizzera italiana

The temporal variation of cost-efficiency in Switzerland’s hospitals : an application of mixed models

Farsi, Mehdi

In: Journal of Productivity Analysis, 2008, p. -

This paper uses a mixed effects model to examine the temporal variation of cost efficiency in Switzerland’s general hospitals. The variations in total costs, the number of empty beds and the length of hospital stays are analyzed using financial data from a sample of 168 hospitals operating from 1998 to 2003, as well as hospitalization records disaggregated to Diagnosis Related Groups....

Università della Svizzera italiana

Efficiency measurement in network industries : application to the Swiss railway companies

Farsi, Mehdi ; Filippini, Massimo ; Greene, William

In: Journal of Regulatory Economics, 2005, vol. 28, no. 1, p. 69-90

The persistence of increasingly high government subsidies in Switzerland’s railroads has led the federal and cantonal authorities to discussing the possibility of high-powered incentive contracts such as those based on cost efficiency benchmarking. Railways are however, characterized by a high degree of unobserved heterogeneity that could bias the efficiency estimates. This paper examines the...