Most prior theoretical and experimental work involving auction choice has assumed bidders only find out their value after making a choice of which autcion to enter. In this paper we examine whether or not subjects knowing their value prior to making an auction choice impacts their choice...

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,...

We compare two commonly used mechanisms in procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer's preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a precise...

Discriminatory programs that favor local and small firms in government procurement are common in many countries. This paper studies the long-run impact of procurement discrimination on market structure and future competition in industries where learning-by-doing makes incumbent firms more...

Due to the well-known efficiency--rent extraction trade-off, the optimal mechanism in a pure screening environment (e.g., revenue maximization in auctions or cost minimization in procurement) typically calls for distortions in allocative efficiency when agents possess private information at the...

We analyze the problem of a buyer who purchases a long-term project from one of several suppliers. A changing state of the world influences the costs of the suppliers. Complete contracts conditioning on all future realizations of the state are infeasible. We show that contractual incompleteness...

Collusion likely has adverse effects on social welfare. In this paper, we study collusion in the e-procurement market in Ukraine. We document that the bidding patterns in the data are incompatible with a competitive equilibrium. We develop a novel structural test to detect pairs and, thereby,...

We study the relationship between collusion and corruption in a stylized model of repeated procurement where the cost of reporting corrupt bureaucrats gives rise to a free riding problem. As in Dixit (2015, 2016), cooperation among honest suppliers alleviates free-riding in reporting. However,...

In public sector procurement, social welfare often depends on the time taken to complete the contract. A leading example is highway construction, where slow completion times inflict a negative externality on commuters. Recently, highway departments have introduced innovative contracting methods...

We provide a comparison of bidding behavior between multi-round and single-round auctions considering bid lettings for asphalt construction contracts that are known to have primarily private costs. Using a reduced-form differenc-in-difference approach as well as the nonparametric estimation...