Introduction / Nicola Dimitri, Gustavo Piga and Giancarlo Spagnolo -- The variety of procurement practice : evidence from public procurement / Laura Carpineti, Gustavo Piga and Matteo Zanza -- General strategic principles -- When should procurement be centralized? / Nicola Dimitri, Federico Dini...

In practical activity, the procurer can often decide to split the supply of a product in multiple contracts, or lots. This paper surveys some competitive tendering procedures for multiple contracts and discusses how the choice of the most appropriate format of competitive tendering for the...

A seminal result in the theory of competitive bidding holds that the buyer can lower the expected awarding price of a procurement contract by setting a reserve price below her opportunity cost for realizing the project. In this paper, we first provide a non-technical explanation for this result,...