Public-Private Partnerships: Goods and the Structure of Contracts

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the structure of contracts for public-private partnerships (PPP) that produce products and services that generally include mixtures of both public and private goods. A three-stage framework, sourced with the incomplete contracting and control rights literature, is advanced to evaluate the successes and failures of a variety of PPP in the natural resources. These case studies provide unique insights into the contract structures that are typically designed for the management and provision of impure public goods. We demonstrate the desired contract structure of a PPP depends on the type of good or service produced, and it is this pivotal point that generally results in shared authority in the extraction or production and consumptive distribution of natural resources.