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,...

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...