Owner or Holder? A Critical Study of Property Rights in Public Services

This paper deals with efficient organizational choices for the provision of public services. To better apprehend observed contracts of public-private partnerships, we depart from the property -rights literature to distinguish between ownership, rights to make residual decisions, and rights to receive residual benefits. Indeed, such rights can be temporarily transferred to a private firm, even if ownership of the assets remains public. Hence, such a separation makes it possible to analyse the large continuum of contracts from full private to full public management. Our results show that there is always a degree of private involvement that is socially efficient.