In this paper, firms engage in rent seeking in order to be assigned a governmental contract. We analyze how a change in the contract length affects the firms' rent-seeking behavior. A longer contract leads to more rent seeking at a contract assignment stage, as the firms value the contract...

In public procurement a temporal separation of award and actual contracting can frequently be observed. In this paper we give an explanation for this institutional setting. For incomplete procurement contracts we show that such a separation may increase efficiency. We show that efficiency can be...

How does electoral manipulation affect elected officials' willingness to satisfy their constituents? Although the literature has highlighted the role of elections as mechanisms of accountability, we do not know how elections whose integrity is compromised influence elected officials' actions in...