New decision support systems for Public Private Partnership projects

It is well established that one of the key contributing factors to the growth of countries’ economies is the existence of appropriate economic and social infrastructures. The setup of these infrastructures and their operation or delivery of public services associated with them have proved to be a costly and often unaffordable business for most governments. Therefore, private sector participation in the delivery of public services has been opted for by governments under Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Additional reasons for the public sector to choose a PPP framework to deliver public services include the public sector representatives’ lack of sufficient technical knowledge and specifications required by most projects; the required amount of investment to implement such projects is too high to be affordable by the public sector alone; the increasing difficulties of predicting and controlling the uncertainties that typically govern the phases of such projects including the level of actual demand for the related services by the time the project is operational; the level of bureaucracy in the public sector and its implications on the time frame of decision-making processes; the relatively low efficiency in project execution by the public sector; and most importantly the fact that, in practice, these difficulties are often better managed by the private sector who seem to possess both the financial and the executive capabilities to undertake such projects Currently, there is a gap in the game theory literature on modelling PPP related decisions and issues. This thesis contributes to reducing such gap by proposing three novel and practice-oriented game theoretical models along with algorithms for solving them, namely an ordinal game for the shortlisting of potential private sector partners; two non-cooperative dynamic games for negotiation with shortlisted private sector partners and selection of private sector partner to award the PPP contract to; and a non-cooperative dynamic game for financial renegotiation post-PPP contract award. In sum, each novel game addresses an important problem faced by the private sector during the typical stages of the life cycle of PPPs, namely private sector partner selection at the tendering stage; negotiation between the public sector and shortlisted bidders to select the candidate to whom to award a PPP contract to at the post-tendering stage; and financial re-negotiation between the public sector and the selected private sector partner at the post-contract award stage