The first part of the paper reports the results from a sequence of laboratory experiments comparing the bidding behavior for multiple contracts in three different sealed bid auction mechanisms; first-price simultaneous, first-price sequential and first-price combinatorial bidding. The design of...

Deadlines and penalties are widely used to incentivize effort. We model how these incentive contracts affect the work rate and time taken in a procurement setting, characterizing the efficient contract design. Using new micro-level data on Minnesota highway construction contracts that includes...

This paper has adopted the exploratory case study method of analyzing a few recent cases of public procurement irregularities on Indian Railways documented by the vigilance departments and the CAG available in public domain to inquire into the following issues: (a) how do irregularities and...

Under recurrent procurement, the awarding of a contract to a firm may put it in an advantageous position in future tenders, which may reduce competition over time. The objective of this paper is to study the dynamics of competition for tendered contracts, focusing on factors that may generate...

Indian Railways is one of the world's largest public sector organizations. Its network, traffic, organization and extent of vertical integration are gigantic. This paper undertakes a critical examination of its procurement process to understand the procedures and institutional mechanisms which...

The risks of corruption in public sector procurements are higher due to larger sizes of contracts involved. Procurement processes of Indian public organizations have gradually been strengthened over the years, under prodding of oversight bodies, to incorporate most of the methods for preventing...

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 investigate the relationship between the time politicians stay in office and the functioning of public procurement. To this purpose, we collect a data set on the Italian municipal governments and all the procurement auctions they administered between 2000 and 2005. Identification is achieved...

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This delegation invites corruption. In this paper we propose a model of corruption, examine how corruption affects the auction game, how the anticipation of corruption affects bidding, and how it altogether changes the revenue ranking...

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...