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PurposeThe paper aims to study the relevance of the German historical school and American Institutionalism for contemporary research in social sciences. The subject scope of the paper is to trace how concepts, ideas, and frameworks trickle from the historical school into later research programs.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology of the paper is a textual analysis of articles and books that either relates the relationship between the historical school and the institutionalism or make explicit or implicit references to the most important concepts and methodologies in these schools.FindingsThe paper has two main findings. The first is that Commons was heavily influenced by Weber's ideal‐types when he wrote his most important book Institutional Economics. The second is that concepts and methodologies used by the historical school and American institutionalism are used in nearly all areas of the social sciences. But the researchers seldom make explicit references to these schools.Research limitations/implicationsA limitation of the present paper is that it draws too a very limited extent directly on the publications of the German historical school. Future research could try and reconstruct how the American instutionalists came to the conclusions they did on the historical school. It is possible that differences in political opinions and competition between two schools with partly similar messages prompted writers like Veblen and Commons to exaggerate differences of opinion.Originality/valueOne important contribution of the paper is the discussion of the influences the historical school had on leading institutionalists. Another important contribution is the exploration of present and future research projects that could benefit from revisiting the theories and methodologies of the historical school and institutionalism. By making more explicit the references to these schools, new insights can be gained on how to develop research methodologies and understanding the limits and potentials of pursuing a research approach.

ABSTRACT**:  An important component in the deregulation of the public sector in the European Union is public procurement of services and products. This article studies the bidding behaviour of firms participating in public tenders of passenger railway services in Sweden. In a theoretical part of the article we discuss the various possible reasons behind high and low bids in tenders, linked to a discussion on pricing strategies and continuous and discontinuous economies of scale regarding costs of production. Detailed data on bids and bidders in Swedish tenders of railway services are then analyzed. 37 tenders taking place between 1989 and 2005 are included.

During the past 15 years competitive tenders have become a common procedure to procure and organise passenger railway services in European Union member countries. Different models have been developed in different countries, spanning from the British radical privatisation and franchising of the railway services to the more incremental processes in countries like Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. The variety of tendering models has occurred for a number of reasons. For example, EU legislation permits different models of organising tenders, member countries have had different goals with the introduction of tenders and other reforms, and within countries we find trial-and-error processes aiming at reducing earlier flaws. In this article we will describe the dominating tendering procedures, look into their theoretical rationale and discuss their possible pitfalls and advantages, drawing from the experiences of several countries. It is evident that the different tendering regimes suffer from different types of problems. In the Swedish tenders there have often been very few competing firms, in Britain the long time span of the first round of franchised contracts resulted in difficulties in making correct estimates of future developments etc. The article concludes with an overall appraisal of the different models and explores the possibilities for learning across the tendering regimes.

AbstractIn principle, competitively tendered contracts in Swedish public bus transport are not supposed to be renegotiated during the contract period. In practice, it happens quite frequently. The need for renegotiations became evident during the COVID-19 crisis. This external shock to the system was unusually strong. Demand for bus services dropped abruptly, affecting revenues of procuring authorities and, depending on contract type, also bus operators. To make the situation even worse, costs typically remained constant, as frequent services were supposed to be upheld to avoid the spreading of the virus in crowded buses. Contract renegotiations during the COVID-19 crisis were clearly caused by unexpected exogenous events. Contracts with passenger incentives, linking a substantial part of compensation to the number of passengers, have been more likely to be renegotiated than gross-cost contracts, which were easier to adjust to the drop in demand. Typically, renegotiations were triggered by operators. While being a pragmatically rational response to an extreme situation, the renegotiations and their outcome may not in all cases have been compliant with the legal framework for public procurements, even when taking into account the exemptions made possible by the framework. In cases where passenger incentive contracts have been transformed into gross-cost contracts it could be argued that the nature of the contract has been changed. A new tender should then probably have been performed instead, although this has not been tried in court. The COVID-19 crisis could have long-term impact on contracts and procurements in the industry, affecting how effective competition will be in future tenders. For now, gross-cost contracts seem to be the norm, and it is possible that passenger-incentive contracts will become less common overall. One way to handle unexpected events with profound impact could be to include so-called threat-points that trigger renegotiation of a contract.

AbstractTransaction costs have been an issue since the advent of the deregulation of the European railway markets in the 1990s. Transaction cost economics received renewed attention in research on the deregulated railway markets in the EU after the publications of two influential reports in the early 2010s.In this article, we develop a model that enables classification and measurement of transaction costs and other coordination costs in deregulated markets. This model is then used to analyze the costs of path allocation in the Swedish railway sector and to compare the results with findings in previous research. We also discuss the economic rationale of the distribution of coordination costs among the involved parties.Our key empirical findings are that the total coordination costs in the Swedish market‐mimicking path allocation process are as low as or lower than the most cost‐efficient market coordination processes studied in railway markets, and that the state administrations take on nearly all the coordination costs in order to minimize the effects of opportunism, rent‐seeking and information impactedness. Another finding is that the size of the coordination costs found by different studies seems to be dependent on whether a bottom‐up or a top‐down approach is used.

Nearly all regional public bus services in Sweden have been competitively tendered for 30 years. The way to perform tenders has undergone significant changes since the first tenders were carried out in the late 1980s. The most important changes are: 1) pure gross cost contracts have been replaced with contracts that include bonus and malus clauses to safeguard the quality of the service or contracts with passenger incentives; 2) bundling of bus lines into larger networks; 3) requirements on operators to provide buses that use specific types of fuel, for example electricity or gas; and 4) bundling of bus and railway services into one contract. The case in Sweden for using incentives based on the number of passengers is to a high extent motivated by a national goal to double the market for regional public transportation and is partly motivated as a way to solve practical problems encountered by the PTAs. Building on previous research, the goal of this paper is to explore and compare how the contract design in tendered regional bus services in Sweden influences performance in terms of costs, passenger growth, and on the frequency of major conflicts between the contracting parties. The economic performance and other effects of the different contract types is measured using a database on all Sweden's regional bus services, collected by the government agency Transport Analysis, and national data on public bus services published annually by the same agency. The conflict aspects are studied using the annual reports of the PTAs procuring the bus services.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Sweden's recent reforms to open the railway passenger markets to entry, and to addresses four critical issues for the success of the reforms; the allocation of infrastructure capacity, the provision of maintenance and terminal facilities, the access to rolling stock and the provision of information and ticketing to travelers. The analysis shows that the legislation and regulatory tools that are needed to handle these challenges to a large extent remain to be developed.