This note examines the Integrity Pact (IP) methodology proposed by Transparency International to confront the problem of corruption in public procurement. The examination draws from a decision model for participants developed elsewhere, in which the critical elements are shown to be the...

The prisoner’s dilemma is sometimes invoked to describe the situation facing participants in tenders. Reasoning on the basis of the dilemma metaphor, it is contended that agreeing not to bribe public officials in order to win contracts (collaboration) leads to better outcomes than bribing...

In environments where regulations are lax and controls function badly, cleanly participating in tenders is irrational. An increase in one single firm’s propensity to bribe induces the same behaviour upon the others (“bad apple effect”), and the likelihood of firms to bribe tends to...

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social services). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the...

A number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller’s valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively. This widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature. Recent...

Asymmetric pricing is the phenomenon where prices rise more readily than they fall. We articulate, and provide empirical support for, a theory of asymmetric pricing in wholesale prices. In particular, we show how wholesale prices may be asymmetric in the small but symmetric in the large, when...

The literature on costs of price adjustment has long argued that changing prices is a complex and costly process. In fact, some authors have suggested that we should think of firms’ price-setting activities as “producing” prices, similar to the way firms use production processes to produce...

In this study, we empirically examine the extent of price rigidity using a unique store-level time series data set - consisting of (i) actual retail transaction prices, (ii) actual wholesale transaction prices which represent both the retailers' costs and the prices received by manufacturers,...

Platform sharing across manufacturers has recently become common practice in the automobile industry. Its important objective is to reduce procurement costs by taking advantage of the commonality of components, but this often reduces the degree of product differentiation. We investigate this...

This paper introduces the economic theory of gquasi-exclusive territory.h We consider vertical dealings with two upstream firms and four downstream firms that compete in two separate markets. Under quasi- exclusive territory, downstream firms are bound to pay additional charges when selling...