China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

There exists a growing body of literature which looks at export decisions made by firms. Most studies focus on developed countries and do not explore whether different behavioral patterns prevail over the firm size distribution. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature by analyzing...

This paper considers the supplier’s strategic delivery lead time in a public procurement setting as the result of the firm’s opportunistic behaviour on the optimal investment timing. In the presence of uncertainty on construction costs, we model the supplier’s option to defer the...

We provide a general framework in which to determine the optimal penalty fee inducing the contractor to respect the contracted delivery date in public procurement contracts (PPCs). We do this by developing a real option model that enables us to investigate the contractor’s value of investment...

When procurement contracts are awarded through competitive tendering participating firms commit ex ante to fulfil a set of contractual duties. However, selected contractors may find profitable to renege ex post on their promises by opportunistically delivering lower quality standards. In order...

Competitive bidding (as auctions) is commonly used to procure goods and services. Public buyers are often mandated by law to adopt competitive procedures to ensure transparency and promote full competition. Recent theoretical literature, however, suggests that open competition can perform poorly...

Participation of small businesses in the market for public contracts is widely recognized as a key policy issue. It is also commonly held that the adoption of e-procurement solutions can be effective in pursuing such an objective. To this end, we analyze the transactions completed in the period...

This paper studies multi-attribute auctions in which a buyer seeks to procure a complex good and evaluate offers using a quasi-linear scoring rule. Suppliers have private information about their costs, which is summarized by a multi-dimensional type. The scoring rule reduces the multidimensional...

When procurement contracts are incomplete, they are frequently changed after the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder. This results in a final cost that differs from the initial price, and may involve significant transaction costs due to renegotiation. We propose a stylized model of bidding...

Tourism has been regarded as a major source of economic growth and a good source of foreign exchange earnings. Tourism has also been considered as an activity that imposes costs on the host country. Such costs include increased pollution, congestion and despoliation of fragile environments and...