We study a model of procurement auctions in which information policies can be used to treat two heterogeneous suppliers asymmetrically. The buyer is shown to be better off revealing information about her preferences to the weak supplier only, when there is a sufficient cost difference between...

We analyze multi-attribute procurement auctions with risk-averse suppliers. As the number of suppliers increases or the suppliers become more risk-averse, the equilibrium bidding price decreases under the first-score auction but remains the same under the second-score auction. A buyer prefers...

We examine the impact of the type of past experience for de novo contractors on business duration. Our results show that early involvement as a subcontractor in government procurement projects increases the chance of survival.

Anton and Yao (1989) show that in split-award procurement auctions bidders coordinate their bids to sustain high buyer price. We relax their assumption that the buyer has full information about the suppliers’ production costs and restore the coordination outcome.

The government wants two tasks to be performed. In each task, unobservable effort can be exerted by a wealth-constrained private contractor. If the government faces no binding budget constraints, it is optimal to bundle the tasks. The contractor in charge of both tasks then gets a bonus payment...

We consider the contribution of reserves to the efficient mobilization of military manpower. Our analysis suggests that offering recruits an option to serve as reservists enhances social welfare if there is a sufficiently strong relationship between recruit performance in the military and their...

We argue that subsidized food distribution systems that fail to publicize how much food has been allocated to each local market will experience high rates of theft on the margin as they are expanded. We provide the first comparable cross-section of estimates of subsidized food theft. As...

This study finds that countries with high-IQ populations enjoy less corruption. I propose that this is because intelligent people have longer time horizons.

We examine the effect of remittances on corruption using panel data for 111 countries over the period of 1986–2010. We find that remittances increase corruption, especially in non-OECD countries.

The paper investigates the influence of path dependence on corruption in Russian regions. We show that even twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, regions with a higher share of Communist Party members in the 1970s have substantially higher corruption.