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...

In this note, we experimentally examine the relative performance of price-only auctions and multi-attribute auctions. We do so in procurement settings where the buyer can give the winning bidder incentives to exert effort on non-price dimensions after the auction. Both auctions theoretically...

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...

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...

Cost overrun is ubiquitous in public procurement. We argue that this can be the result of a constraint optimal award procedure when the procurer cannot commit not to renegotiate. If cost differences are more pronounced for more complex designs, it is optimal to fix a simple design ex ante and to...

Reverse auctions are considered a fast and inexpensive price discovery tool to award procurement contracts and it is often desirable to award contracts to more than one supplier. We propose a new procurement procedure that is based on a reverse auction. Shares are allocated endogenously,...

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...

We compare two procurement mechanisms, bundling and unbundling, in a two-stage auction model with risk-averse suppliers. They differ in whether two sequential tasks of investment and production are procured through a single auction or two sequential auctions. Each auction adopts a first-price...

Different types of products are procured in government procurement auctions. This paper empirically analyzes the effect of competition (number of bidders) on procurement price of different types of products. In other words, we investigate the optimal number of bidders which minimizes procurement...

We study the effects of corruption on equilibrium competition and social welfare in a first-price public procurement auction. In our model, firms are invited into the auction at positive costs, and a bureaucrat runs the auction on behalf of a government, who may request a bribe from the winning...