Contracts providing payments for not developing natural areas, or for removing cropland from production, generally require long-term commitments. Landowners, however, can decide to prematurely terminate the contract when the opportunity cost of complying with conservation requirements increases....

Drawing on the real-options theory we analyse bidding behaviour in a sealed-bid-first-score procurement auction where suppliers, facing variable production costs, must simultaneously report the contract price and the cost level at which they intend to perform the project. We show that this award...

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...

Ivanova-Stenzel and Salmon (2004a) established some interesting yet puzzling results regarding bidders' preferences between auction formats. The finding is that bidders strongly prefer the ascending to the first price sealed bid auction on a ceteris paribus basis but they are not willing to pay...

The conventional wisdom in the auction design literature is that first price sealed bid auctions tend to make more money while ascending auctions tend to be more efficient. We re-examine these issues in an environment in which bidders are allowed to endogenously choose in which auction format to...

We develop tests for common values at first-price sealed-bid auctions. Our tests are nonparametric, require observation only of the bids submitted at each auction, and are based on the fact that the winner's curse arises only in common values auctions. The tests build on recently developed...

Infrastructure costs in the United States are high and rising. The procurement process is one potential cost driver. In this paper we conduct a survey of procurement practices across the 50 states. We survey both employees at each state department of transportation (DOT) and the road builders...

Public procurement contracts require frequent renegotiation. We exploit the Czech implementation of an EU policy as a natural experiment to investigate the effect of eased renegotiation rules. We document that the eased renegotiation rules decreased winning bids but did not change the final...

Incarcerated individuals in the U.S. purchase goods and services from monopoly vendors selected by their correctional authority. We study telecommunications, which have come under bipartisan scrutiny due to the high prices inmates pay for phone calls. Prospective providers are evaluated on their...