Balancing public interests through limitation, allocation and execution of limited rights

This chapter addresses the question of how the realization of public interests by competitive tendering is affected by the preceding stage of limitation and the succeeding stage of execution of limited rights. For some types of limited rights, for example authorizations, the public interests involved seem primarily related to the need for limiting the number of these rights (instead of allocating them). By contrast, the award of public contracts focusses more naturally on the allocation stage of competitive tendering. Furthermore, the relationship between the allocation stage and the subsequent execution stage does not seem to be univocal. Whereas the sale of assets seems to depart from the assumption that public interests are satisfied once the assets are transferred, for other limited rights the execution stage seems almost as relevant for the promotion of public interests as the allocation stage itself. This chapter seeks to explain why different outcomes in the relationship between limitation, allocation and execution can be observed across different types of limited rights and to explore whether some common denominator can be identified with regard to this relationship.