Organizations learning from others’ successful policies become more competitive not only because their policies improve but also because they avoid the costs of policy innovation. While latecomer advantage has been widely recognized by economists, the policy diffusion literature in political...

With a view to improving public sector efficiency many governments now make public sector bodies competitively bid for funding. We model the bidding process as a game of spatial competition. Using Monte Carlo simulations we show that in efficient equilibria many bidding groups will not be under...