Medical device expenditures are an important driver of the growth in health care spending and hospitals pay significantly different prices for the same medical device. This paper uses hospitals’ acquisition data to explore the determinants of price discrimination in the acquisition of medical...

The public health and economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed governments to substantially and swiftly increase spending. Consequently, public procurement rules have been relaxed in many places to expedite transactions. However, this may also create opportunities for...

The paper considers governments' public procurement decision as a way of influencing industry structure. In a federation in which capital is mobile and capital taxation is harmonized, a home bias in public procurement can potentially be explained as an effort to increase the capital intensity of...

Bei der Auslagerung staatlicher Tätigkeiten auf private Partner kommt es für den Bereich personalintensiver Dienstleistungen durch die anfallende deutsche Umsatzsteuer zu einer zusätzlichen Kostenbelastung, die die Hoheitsträger bisher oft von Outsourcing abhält. Für den Bereich der...

An welchen Kriterien sollte sich die Entscheidung über die bestmögliche Aufgabenverteilung zwischen staatlichen Stellen und privaten Akteuren bezüglich Finanzierung, Erstellung und Betrieb öffentlicher Infrastruktureinrichtungen orientieren? Während die unmittelbare Erstellung der...

Nearly all the macroeconomic literature on environmental policies deals with taxes and tradable permits. A policy instrument that still needs to be looked at is a switch in government expenditure away from environmentally-damaging goods, in particular fossil fuels, and toward resource- and...

We show that privatization can be beneficial even if the government is rational and benevolent, and if the firm's economic and informational environment is independent of the governance structure. The model assumes that wage contracts between the firm's owner (government or private entrepreneur)...

This paper considers the social costs implied by inefficient allocation of contracts in a first price, sealed bid procurement auction with asymmetric bidders. We adopt a constrained (piecewise linear) strategy equilibrium concept and estimate the structural parameters of the bidders'...

We consider procurement of an innovation from heterogeneous sellers. Innovations are random but depend on unobservable effort and private information. We compare two procurement mechanisms where potential sellers first bid in an auction for admission to an innovation contest. After the contest,...

The paper studies procurement contracts with pre-project investigations in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. To model the procurer's roblem, we extend a standard sequential screening model to endogenous information acquisition with moral hazard. The optimal contract displays...