A well-functioning bureaucracy is a precondition for efficient public goods provision. However, bureaucratic decision-making is still largely seen as a black box. We provide novel insights into the preferences of bureaucrats regarding their work outcomes. We focus on a major public sector...

This paper studies the existence of election cycles in public procurement in the European Union for the national level. We analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the contract, and the project completion. We point out...

This paper studies whether political budget cycles occur in public procurement in the European Union. Using project- level data from Tenders Electronic Daily (2008-2018), I analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the...

We study competitive awarding procedures of short haul railway passenger services in Germany from 1995 to 2011 by means of a newly collected data set. In particular, we use regression techniques to investigate the determinants of the number of bidders, the identity of the winning bidder and the...

The targeted design of auctions has to take behavioral regularities into account. This pa- per explores whether procurement auction formats can take advantage of bidders' willingness- to-pay-willingness-to-accept disparity. In a laboratory experiment, we compare four different second-price...

We empirically investigate the effect of procurement oversight on contract outcomes. In particular, we stress a distinction between public and private oversight: the former is a set of bureaucratic checks enacted by contracting offices, while the latter is carried out by private insurance...

I study a case of market sharing agreements to provide evidence of coordination between colluding firms on the degree to which they compete against each other (henceforth referred to as head-to-head competition) and their bidding behavior. I also quantify the impact that coordinating...

We analyze the problem of a buyer who purchases a long-term project from one of several suppliers. A changing state of the world influences the costs of the suppliers. Complete contracts conditioning on all future realizations of the state are infeasible. We show that contractual incompleteness...

Problem definition: We consider a buyer that needs to source a fixed quantity. She faces several potential suppliers that might fail to deliver. The buyer conducts a procurement auction to determine contract suppliers and can choose between single-sourcing and multi-sourcing. If contract...

We study how delivery times and prices for hospital medical devices respond to the introduction of centralized procurement. Our identification strategy leverages a legislative change in Italy that mandated centralized purchases for a sub-set of devices. The statutory centralization generated a...