We assume that students can acquire a wage premium, thanks to studies, and form a rational expectation of their future earnings, which depends on personal ability. Students receive a private, noisy signal of their ability, and universities can condition admission decisions on the results of...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resources and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts or positions that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is ruled out,...

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This delegation invites corruption. In this paper we propose a model of corruption, examine how corruption affects the auction game, how the anticipation of corruption affects bidding, and how it altogether changes the revenue ranking...

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. It is shown that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual real-izations of benefit and costs of the project, the second...

We analyse procurement auctions in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money that they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the offered quality of the technology or good. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus,...

Substantial elements of innovation have been observable during recent years in rig supply, in particular regarding contracts and organisation. This trend has been driven by the fact that rising costs over many years have put profitability under pressure. On the basis of theory and available...

We develop a simple theoretical model of a long term buyer-supplier relationship with non-contractible buyer specific R&D investment, and derive predictions on the effects of trust and competition on suppliers' investment and buyers' procurement strategies. We address these issues empirically...

Cost overrun is ubiquitous in public procurement. We argue that this can be the result of a constraint optimal award procedure when the procurer cannot commit not to renegotiate. If cost differences are more pronounced for more complex designs, it is optimal to fix a simple design ex ante and to...

This paper analyzes theoretically and empirically how upstream markets are affected by deregulation downstream. Deregulation tends to increase the level of uncertainty in the upstream market. Our theoretical analysis predicts that deregulated firms respond to this increase in uncertainty by...

For the procurement of complex goods the early exchange of information is important to avoid costly renegotiation ex post. We show that this is achieved by bilateral negotiations but not by auctions. Negotiations strictly outperforms auctions if sellers are likely to have superior information...