We study the effects of corruption on equilibrium competition and social welfare in a first-price public procurement auction. In our model, firms are invited into the auction at positive costs, and a bureaucrat runs the auction on behalf of a government, who may request a bribe from the winning...

The frequent renegotiation of public contracts is variously attributed to collusion between officials and bidders, the desire to circumvent budgetary rules, and other factors. This column challenges the industrial organisation view of public contract renegotiation, showing that frequent...

Do public agents undertake socially inefficient activities to protect themselves? In politically contestable markets, part of the lack of flexibility in the design and implementation of the public procurement process reflects public agents' risk adaptations to limit the political hazards from...

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,...

We propose a new procurement procedure which allocates shares of the total amount to be procured depending on the bids of suppliers. Among the properties of the mechanism are:(i) Bidders have an incentive to participate in the procurement procedure, as equilibrium payoffs are strictly...

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...

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...

This paper models a contest where several sellers compete for a contract with a single buyer. There are several styles of possible designs with a subset of them preferred by the buyer. We examine what happens when the buyer communicates information about his preferences. If the sellers are...