Abstract

In countries where transportation infrastructure is underdeveloped, newly built facilities tend to attract and increase demand. This can lead to situations where future traffic levels exceed the concession capacity limit, and additional investments in expansion is required. One common solution is to mandate this investment as a firm obligation in concession contracts, either after a set number of years or when demand reaches capacity. In this article, we show why these policies are suboptimal and propose a model that combines flexible capacity expansion decisions with conditional term extensions. We model this flexibility under the real options approach and the project value uncertainty during the life of the concession as a Brownian Bridge. As a novel contribution, we take into account the fact that concession revenues are bounded by the current traffic capacity of the road, which represents an upper absorbing barrier that has implications for the expansion decision. As a numerical application, this model is applied to a typical toll road project in Brazil. The results show that flexible expansion policies, coupled with conditional term extensions, have significant advantages. These findings can be of use to government officials involved in developing policies to attract private investment in public infrastructure projects.

摘要

在交通基础设施不发达的国家，新建设施往往会吸引并增加需求。这可能会导致将来的流量水平超出特许容量限制，并且需要在扩展方面进行额外投资的情况。一种常见的解决方案是在一定年限之后或需求达到需求后，将这项投资作为特许权合同中的一项固定义务。在本文中，我们将说明为什么这些策略不是最优的，并提出了一个模型，该模型将灵活的容量扩展决策与条件项扩展结合在一起。我们在实物期权方法和特许权使用期限内的项目价值不确定性（布朗桥）中对这种灵活性进行建模。作为一项新颖的贡献，我们考虑到这样一个事实，即特许经营收入受当前道路通行能力的限制，这代表了一个较高的吸收障碍，对扩展决策具有影响。作为数值应用，此模型被应用于巴西的典型收费公路项目。结果表明，灵活的扩展策略以及有条件的期限扩展具有明显的优势。这些发现可能对参与制定政策以吸引私人投资公共基础设施项目的政府官员有用。结合条件词扩展，具有明显的优势。这些发现对参与制定政策以吸引私人投资公共基础设施项目的政府官员有用。结合条件词扩展，具有明显的优势。这些发现可能对参与制定政策以吸引私人投资公共基础设施项目的政府官员有用。