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With the establishment of Competition Commission of India (CCI), Competition law-class actions, especially with regards to abuse of dominance by monopolists, are slowly becoming unhappy realities with both government-owned as well as private companies. This case used Coal India Limited (CIL), a public monolith which was penalized recently by CCI, as a subject of analysis to delve deeper into various conceptual understandings related to public sector functioning, such as public versus private provisioning, natural versus designed monopoly, dominance versus abuse of dominance, corporate governance versus government mandated governance, and finally natural resource allocation.

Pricing of natural gas in India suffers from asymmetry because of the presence of limited suppliers having byzantine contracts. The oligopolistic market combined with price regulation results in welfare losses, and market failure. We argue that for the sake of long-term development of natural gas sector in fast developing economies like India, the long-run marginal cost (LRMC) seems to be the most suitable pricing policy. In the case analysis, we present a theoretical framework of calculating LRMC while acknowledging that the conditions necessary for a ‘first-best world’ rarely exist. We conclude that it is very much possible to gradually move from the existing ad-hoc pricing mechanism to a more robust LRMC regime that takes into account not just the production cost but also a scarcity premium as well as any externalities resulting from the natural-gas fuel cycle. The outcome based on our model compares very well with the one from the Rangarajan Committee's formula that got the government's nod recently for fixing of price of indigenously produced natural gas, to be effective from 01st April 2014.

To recognize and investigate the hypotheses that opportunistic behaviour of project participants in infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs) changes over the project’s life cycle. Case study methodology is adopted. The first Indian highway PPP project, awarded with negative grant, is used as the case context. Opportunistic behaviour is a continuous game played by the project stakeholders. Its manifestation depends on the vulnerability of the other party at that point in time in the project life cycle and the past display of opportunism. Because the study is limited to a highway project in an emerging economy, the findings may lack generalizability for which further research is recommended. PPP is increasingly popular. Stakeholders recognize that the existing ex-ante contractual arrangements that seek to mitigate opportunism are not enough for project success. This study addresses this difficulty by providing a closer understanding of how opportunistic behaviours evolve over projects’ life cycle and what steps are necessary to negotiate. Failure to address the antecedents of opportunistic behaviour in time leads to a competition to be more opportunistic, in which the common public gets short changed. This study is an attempt to advance understanding of stakeholders’ behaviour outside the ambit of contract. The extant literature is largely silent on the timing and vulnerability of opportunistic behaviour, viewing it as a static concept. The study demonstrates the changing nature of opportunism that manifests in different forms over the projects life cycle.