Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when services are procured rather than produced in-house. However, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009,...

Non-contractible quality dimensions are at risk of degradation when the provision of public services is privatized. However, privatization may increase quality by fostering performance-improving innovation, particularly if combined with increased competition. We assemble a large data set on...

Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when services are procured rather than produced in-house. However, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009,...

Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when the service is procured rather than produced in-house. On the other hand, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden for the...

Centralization of public procurement can lower prices for the government's direct purchase of goods and services. This paper focuses on indirect savings. Public administrations that do not procure directly through a central procurement agency might benefit from the availability of...

Is work overload a friction to public agencies? Using data on R&D procurements, patents, and contracting units from a US federal agency, we investigate how officer workload impacts innovation procurement outcomes. Unanticipated retirement shifts provide an exogenous source of variation that we...

We study the potential benefits of adding a lottery component to cut the main risks associated with standard negotiated and rule-based auction procurement procedures. We show that adopting a two stage approach in which bureaucrats first negotiate with a small number of bidders to assess their...

This paper solves the equilibrium bid functions of third- and higher-price auctions for a large class of distribution functions of bidders' valuations, assuming the symmetric independent private values framework, and risk neutrality. In all these auctions, equilibrium bids exceed bidders'...

Dieser Diskussionsbeitrag kommentiert Güths axiomatische Begründung der Zweit-Preis-Auktion. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch Güths umfangreiche Analyse der Lambda-Auktion durch eine einfache und anschaulich interpretierbare Lösung ersetzt.

We analyse procurement auctions in which sellers are distinguished on the basis of the ratios of quality per unit of money that they offer. Sellers are privately informed on the offered quality of the technology or good. We assume that the procurer cannot perfectly identify the best offer. Thus,...