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...

"Public procurement affects a substantial share of world trade flows, amounting to 1000 billion euros per year. In the EU, the public purchase of works, goods and services has been estimated to account on average for 16% of GDP. The novelty of this book is that it focuses on the new European...

pt. 1. Supporting social considerations via public procurement -- pt. 2. Lots, the economic and legal challenges of centralized procurement -- pt. 3. Innovation through innovative partnerships -- pt. 4. Green public procurement.

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,...

This paper represents one of the first attempts to benchmarking public procurement practices for the same product categories. Questionnaires from European procurement agencies provide several insights on procurement contest design and on participation and competition patterns of two important...