Markets with asymmetric information will often employ third-party certification labels to distinguish between higher and lower quality transactions, yet little is known about the effects of certification policies on the evolution of markets. How does the stringency in quality certification...

Does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better economic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works by combining contract-level data on procurement performance and bureau-level data on competence and workforce...

Reputational incentives may be a powerful mechanism for improving supplier performance. We analyze their role in contract awarding, exploiting an experiment run by a firm which introduced a new vendor rating system scoring suppliers' past performance and linking it to the award of future...