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...

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,...