Plenary Lecture
The Modal Split in Transportation and Cross Elasticity
Assistant Professor Zdenek Riha
Department of Logistics and Transport Management
Faculty of Transportation Sciences
Czech Technical University in Prague
Czech Republic
E-mail: riha@fd.cvut.cz
Abstract: It holds in general that for a perfect competition the following four conditions must hold: perfect information of buyers and sellers, zero transaction costs of provider change, homogenous product and big number of suppliers. If we aim at the condition of a homogenous product, i.e. all sellers supply products of the same features, we find out that this condition can be fulfilled in practice only in a very limited number of cases like e.g. the market of primary raw materials. Then it is interesting to analyse, whether the rival products are substitutes. This question is solved by the so called cross elasticity. This topic is also aimed at in this paper that analyses the development of oil and fuel prices and studies their impact on the output of passenger rail transport. If we mention the cross elasticity, two goods A and G are compared that are either substitutes (i.e. mutually replaceable), complements (or additional goods) or there is no similar relation between them. The cross elasticity indicates the volume that changes in the demand of the good B when it comes to a unit change of good A. The paper analyses in this way the transport market and presents another interesting statistics that have featured the transport in the past ten years.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Ing. Zdenek Riha, Ph.Dwas born on 12th April 1974. His dissertation (2005) was focused on the problems of externalities in transportation. He aims on relations between economics, transportation, environment and energy system. ZdeněkŘíha is author or co-author of approximately 30 papers in special journals or international conferences and of one monograph. He devotes to popularization of transport and he created three exhibitions, which were focused on transportation system development from history (middle age) to present, it was seen by approximately 40 000 visitors.