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...

A number of recent papers have proposed that a pattern of isolated winning bids may be associated with collusion. In contrast, others have suggested that bid clustering, especially of the two lowest bids, is indicative of collusion. In this paper, we present evidence from an actual procurement...

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...

A key issue in strategic management in the public sector is how government creates economic and social value through procurement. Unfortunately, most procurement studies are based on contract theories, which fail to incorporate the growing role of strategic management in performance. We fill...

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 paper considers governments' public procurement decision as a way of influencing industry structure. In a federation in which capital is mobile and capital taxation is harmonized, a home bias in public procurement can potentially be explained as an effort to increase the capital intensity of...

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...

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 use of public procurement to promote private innovation activities has attracted increasing attention recently. Germany implemented a legal change in its procurement framework in 2009, which allowed government agencies to specify innovative aspects of procured products as selection criteria...

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...