The traditional Medicare fee-for-service program may be able to purchase clinical laboratory test services at a lower cost through competitive bidding. Demonstrations of competitive bidding for clinical laboratory tests have been twice mandated or authorized by Congress but never implemented....

The principal aim of this paper is to select a contractor who offers the best value for money. This will nearly always involve a process of competitive tendering. The final decision as to which contractor offers the best value for money will be determined by the factors like quality/price...

This paper discusses the design of a novel multi-dimensional mechanism which allows a principal to procure a single project or an item from multiple suppliers through a two-step payment. The suppliers are capable of producing different qualities at costs which cannot exceed a certain value and...

Electricity market liberalisation has become common practice internationally. The justification for this process has been to enhance competition in a market traditionally characterised by statutory monopolies in an attempt to reduce costs to end-users. This paper endeavours to see whether a pool...

In many auctions, a good match between the bidder and seller raises the value of the contract for both parties although information about the quality of the match may be incomplete. This paper examines the case in which the bidder is better informed about the quality of his match with the seller...

After the close of an auction, the winning bidder may find that he is unable to carry out his bid offer. This paper seeks to determine what measures the seller should take to maximize his share of the surplus when bidders are privately informed about their risk of default. Special attention is...

In many auctions, matching between the bidder and seller raises the value of the contract for both parties. However, information about the quality of the match may be incomplete. We consider the case in which each bidder observes the quality of his match with the seller but the seller does not...

The posting system used in major league baseball to obtain free agent players from Japan has some similarities and many differences from the transfer system used to obtain foreign free agents in European football. This paper uses auction theory to assess the efficiencies (or lack of) in the...

This paper reports on the design of a novel two-stage mechanism, based on strictly proper scoring rules, that allows a centre to acquire a costly forecast of a future event (such as a meteorological phenomenon) or a probabilistic estimate of a specific parameter (such as the quality of an...

This paper reports on the design of a novel two-stage mechanism, based on strictly proper scoring rules, that allows a centre to acquire a costly probabilistic estimate of some unknown parameter, by eliciting and fusing estimates from multiple suppliers. Each of these suppliers is capable of...