We examine auction data to determine if bid rigging presents in procurement auctions for paving works in Ibaraki City, Osaka, Japan. We first show that sporadic bidding wars are caused by the participation of potential “outsiders.” Assuming that the ring is all-inclusive if the auction is...

Several Japanese local governments started to add endogenous minimum prices to firstprice auctions in their public procurements. Any bid less than the endogenous minimum price is referred to as abnormally low and is excluded from the procurement procedure. The endogenous minimum price is...

We consider the procurement of a complex, indivisible good when bid preparation is costly, assuming a population of heterogeneous contractors. Shortlisting is introduced to implement the optimal number of bidders, and we explore whether the procurer should reimburse the nonrecoverable cost of...

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This invites corruption. We propose a model of corruption in which the auctioneer orchestrates bid rigging by inviting a bidder to either lower or raise his bid, whichever is more profitable. We characterize equilibriumbidding in first-...

Many organizations use procurement tenders to buy large amounts of goods and services. Especially in the public sector the use of these reverse auctions has grown rapidly over the past decades. For the (reverse) unit price auction experience as well as theory have shown that they can attract...

For a repeated procurement problem, we compare two stylized negotiating cultures which differ in how the buyer uses an entrant to exert pressure on the incumbent resembling U.S. style and Japanese style procurement. In each period, the suppliers are privately informed about their production...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. A project's cost is private information and its value for the designer may vary. In this allocation problem, the selection of projects - both which and how many - is endogenously...

Procurement auctions that assume independent private values (IPV) provide a benchmark for analysis that is readily demonstrated but often unrealistic. Firms who compete for exclusive selling rights normally derive outputs from a highly similar set of inputs which, in turn, allows them to obtain...

Procurement regulation aimed at curbing discrimination requires equal treatment of sellers. However, Deb and Pai (2017) show that such regulation imposes virtually no restrictions on the ability to discriminate. We propose a simple rule - imitation perfection - that restricts discrimination...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...