Exploiting a rule in Brazil that waives competitive bidding for small-value purchases, I find evidence of an efficiency-quality trade-off when government agencies have more flexibility in awarding public procurement contracts. Products purchased with higher discretion are 23 percent more...

Over ten years after the launching of the Single Market the EC?s directives aimed to the liberalization of government procurement remain largely unimplemented. This paper analyses the consequences on the pattern of specialization, on welfare and on income inequalities of the persistence of a...

The effects on national welfare and market access of two important public procurement practices (discrimination and non-transparency) are analyzed with an eye to the ongoing discussions on procurement reform in the Doha Round. The analysis suggests that the welfare payoffs of adopting mechanisms...

Based on the literature on public procurement regulation, we use an Agent-Based Model to assess the performance of different selection procedures. Specifically, we aim at investigating whether and how the inclusion of reputation of firms in the public procurement selection process affects the...

This is the submission which we made to the United Kingdom Cabinet Office Open Standards Consultation. The aim of this submission is not to present new research findings, but to show what we believe are the policy consequences of recent progress in the understanding of the economics of Open...

Procuring authorities frequently use screening in order to mitigate risky bids. This study estimates the effect of bid screening and litigation on entry and bidding using a unique data set on highway construction procurement auctions in Poland. The market exhibits a screening method that ex...

We consider a procurement problem in which the procurement agent is supposed to allocate the realization of a project according to a competitive mechanism that values bids in terms of the proposed price and quality. Potential bidders have private information about their production costs. Since...