Vaccination is a critical tool, along with suppression and treatment, for controlling epidemics such as SARS-CoV-2. To maximize the impact of vaccination, doses should be allocated to the highest value targets, accounting for health and potential economic benefits. We examine what allocation...

We draw upon newly merged administrative data sets to study the relationship between payments from medical technology firms to physicians and medical device procurement by hospitals. These payments (and the interactions that accompany them) may facilitate the transfer of valuable information to...

The strength of contract enforcement determines how firms source inputs and organize production. Using microdata on Indian manufacturing plants, we show that production and sourcing decisions appear systematically distorted in states with weaker enforcement. Specifically, we document that in...

In public sector procurement, social welfare often depends on the time taken to complete the contract. A leading example is highway construction, where slow completion times inflict a negative externality on commuters. Recently, highway departments have introduced innovative contracting methods...

This paper applies ideas from mechanism design to model procurement of prescription drugs. We present a mechanism for government-funded market-driven drug procurement that achieves very close to full static efficiency -- all members have access to all but at most a single drug -- without...

This paper demonstrates that short sales are often misclassified as buyer-initiated by the Lee-Ready and other commonly used trade classification algorithms. This result is due in part to regulations which require short sales be executed on an uptick or zero-uptick. In addition, while the...

Governments employ two basic policies for acquiring land: taking it through exercise of their power of eminent domain; and purchasing it. The social desirability of these two policies is compared in a model in which the government's information about landowners' valuations is imperfect. Under...

In some cases, the law permits a party that unilaterally provides a benefit to another party to recover the estimated value of this benefit. Despite calls for expanding the set of cases to which such a restitution rule applies, the law commonly applies a mutual consent rule under which a party...

Procurement contracts are often incomplete because the initial plans and specifications are changed and refined after the contract is awarded to the lowest bidder. This results in a final cost to the buyer that differs from the low bid, and may also involve significant adaptation and...

Should the buyer of a customized good use competitive bidding or negotiation to select a contractor? To shed light on this question, we offer a framework that compares auctions with negotiations. We then examine a comprehensive data set of private sector building contracts awarded in Northern...