Public organisations are subjected to weak incentives for competition. Therefore, institutional Darwinism cannot apply. Regulation and performance monitoring is required to protect the public interest. This is particularly the case of organisations in the health care arena, since strong...

When procurement takes place in the presence of horizontally differentiated contractors, the design of the object being procured affects the resulting degree of competition. This paper highlights the interaction between the optimal procurement mechanism and the design choice. Contrary to...

Most cases of cost overruns in public procurement are related to important changes in the initial project design. This paper deals with the problem of design specification in public procurement and provides a rationale for design misspecification. We propose a model in which the sponsor decides...

This paper analyzes the problem of abnormally low tenders in the procurement process. Limited liability causes firms in a bad financial situation to bid more aggressively than good firms in the procurement auction. Therefore, it is more likely that the winning firm is a firm in financial...

Most cases of cost overruns in public procurement are related to important changes in the initial project design. This paper deals with the problem of design speciffication in public procurement and provides a rationale for design misspeciffication. We propose a model in which the sponsor...

We study the link between corruption and economic integration. We show that if an economic union establishes a common regulation for public procurement, the country more prone to corruption benefits more from integration. However, if the propensities to corruption are too distinct, the less...

We consider a procurement problem in which the procurement agent is supposed to allocate the realization of a project according to a competitive mechanism that values bids in terms of the proposed price and quality. Potential bidders have private information about their production costs. Since...

This paper demonstrates that all rank test statistics are functions of implicit null space estimators. The paper proposes a novel theory of null space estimation that allows for standard asymptotics, polynomial regressions, and cointegration asymptotics. The paper proves that the behaviour of...

In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of these drive decision making. In this paper we propose a new channel through...

The classical binary classification problem is investigated when it is known in advance that the posterior probability function (or regression function) belongs to some class of functions. We introduce and analyze a method which effectively exploits this knowledge. The method is based on...