In this paper we study the effect of contract design on the performance of railway maintenance in Sweden, using a panel data set over the period 2003–2013. The effect of incentive intensity is estimated, showing that the power of incentive schemes improve performance as measured by the number of infrastructure failures. In addition, we show that the structure of the performance incentive schemes has resulted in a reallocation of effort from failures not causing train delays to failures causing train delays, with a substantial increase in the former type of failures. This signals a deteriorating asset condition, which highlights the need to consider the long-term effects of this incentive structure. Overall, this work shows that the design of the incentive structures has a large impact on the performance of maintenance, and that the estimated effects are important to consider when assessing contract designs within this field.

在本文中，我们使用2003-2013年期间的面板数据集，研究了合同设计对瑞典铁路维护绩效的影响。估算了激励强度的影响，表明以基础设施故障的数量来衡量，激励计划的力量可以提高绩效。此外，我们表明，绩效激励计划的结构导致了工作重分配，从不引起列车延误的故障到导致列车延误的故障，前一种故障的数量大大增加。这预示着资产状况的恶化，这凸显了需要考虑这种激励结构的长期影响。总体而言，这项工作表明激励机制的设计对维护绩效有很大影响，