Transportation economics, public policies, and regulation of transport markets.

The PI's primary research topics have focused on transportation economics and industrial organization. My Master's thesis at the University of Chile focused on analyzing the efficiency of the implementation of frequent flyer programs, considering moral risk and adverse selection.

During the 2019 first semester, The PI was a visiting student at The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. The PI developed the paper: "Monopolistic Operation of Public Transport: A Dynamic Congestion Approach." This paper analyzes the effect of a monopoly public transport operator in a dynamic congestion framework, considering mixed traffic. The PI presented this working paper in the International Transportation Economics Association Annual Conference and School, developed in Paris, Francia, June 2019.

The PI's Ph.D. thesis analyzes public transport efficiency, considering that public transport vehicles share the road capacity with cars, and the commuters' departure pattern is endogenous to the model. The PI's Ph.D. thesis can be divided into two papers.

The first part proposes an analysis of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system's social efficiency. The paper formulates a microeconomic model where the departure pattern is endogenous. Both modes, public transport and cars are available for all users. The paper compares the efficiency of the following public transport policies: fare optimization, frequency optimization under mixed traffic, incorporation of a BRT with and without frequency optimization. The PI presented an initial version of this paper in the International Transportation Economics Association Annual Conference and School, developed in Hong Kong, China, June 2018. The PI presented the final version of this paper in the 30th European Conference on Operational Research (EURO 30), Dublin, Ireland, in June 2019. This paper was published as: 'Basso, Leonardo J. Feres, Fernando Silva, Hugo E. (2019). The efficiency of bus rapid transit (BRT) systems: A dynamic congestion approach. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 127:47 - 71'.

The second paper analyzes the efficient provision of a public transport system operated by buses that share the road capacity with cars. The article defines different frequencies for the congested and the uncongested period to explicitly capture the effects of congestion on the optimal frequency pattern.

All published and working papers that PI has developed during his Ph. D. consider the endogenous departure pattern component. A fundamental part of developing the proposed research requires an endogenous departure pattern component.

The PI also has a stochastic model background because he has teaching experience in the stochastic process field.

Public transport reliability is a highly relevant item when people make decisions about their daily trips. Our research proposal will be a contribution to the society, helping to the planner to make an efficient design of public policies.

We propose connecting our research to the community participating and making seminars with different social actors to spread our investigation and results. We plan to invite the public transport authorities, local authorities, and the general public. For the seminars' organization, we have resources from the Industrial Engineering School, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV), and the Complex Engineering Systems (ISCI) funded by ANID, as Franco Basso is an invited researcher.