Seminar – Competition in London Local Bus Tendering

Professor Michael Waterson, University of Warwick

Under recurrent procurement, the awarding of a contract to a firm may put it in an advantageous position in future tenders, which may reduce competition over time. The paper first studies the dynamics of competition for tendered contracts, focusing on factors that may generate incumbent advantage. It then applies insights from that literature to analyse empirically the evolution of competition in the market for local bus services in London using a sample of repeated contracts for the same object.

Speaker bio

Professor Michael Waterson is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, where he has taught since 1991. His research lies broadly within the field of industrial economics, most recently in the areas of supermarket pricing, online sales, energy markets at wholesale and retail levels and procurement. He has published widely in a range of journals and books. He held previous academic posts at the Universities of Reading and Newcastle and has been President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics and Chair of the (UK) Network of Industrial Economists. He was also General Editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics for five years. Outside academia, his roles have included acting as a special advisor to a House of Lords Select Committee on two occasions and, for a period, Chair of the Utilities Appeals Panel for Guernsey. Between 2005 and 2014 he was a Member of the Competition Commission, where he worked on a number of merger cases and one market investigation. He also worked on a report for BIS/ DCMS on Secondary Ticketing, which was published in 2016. He is now a member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal.