This study empirically investigates the impact of public procurement regulation quality on the competition for tenders and the cost-effectiveness of awarded contracts, by employing the World Bank's Benchmarking Public Procurement and EuroPAM Public Procurement quality scores. Using extensive...

This piece reflects on the role of public procurement regulation in the face of a situation generating an extremely urgent need for the public sector to buy additional supplies and equipment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Counterintuitively, at a time of heightened public expenditure, public...

This paper contributes to the analysis of quantitative indicators (i.e., red flags or screens) to detect corruption in public procurement. Expanding the set of commonly discussed indicators in the literature to new ones derived from the operating practices of police forces and the judiciary,...

This paper contrasts two auction formats often used in public procurement: first price auctions with ex-post screening of bid responsiveness and average bid auctions, in which the bidder closest to the average bid wins. The equilibrium analysis reveals that their ranking is ambiguous in terms of...

In government procurement auctions of construction contracts, entrants are typically less informed and bid more aggressively than incumbent firms. This bidding behavior makes them more susceptible to losses affecting their prospect of survival. In April of 2000, the Oklahoma Department of...

A number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller's valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively. This widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature. Recent...

We empirically investigate the effect of oversight on contract outcomes in public procurement. In particular, we stress a distinction between public and private oversight: the former is a set of bureaucratic checks enacted by contracting offices, while the latter is carried out by private...

This paper looks at how the EU public procurement rules have shown a tendency to permanently expand their scope of application, both within and outside the EU. Inside the EU, the expansion has primarily resulted from blurred coverage boundaries and a creeping application outside their explicit...

This paper aims to determine the extent to which corporate political contributions and the allocation of government procurement contracts are related. We gather information regarding the contributions made by 911 S&P500 companies in 9 congressional election cycles between 1993 and 2010, and...

Research on government e-procurement suggests the existence of price savings ranging from 5% to 20% of the total value of public purchases, which also account for a significant part of GDP. Nevertheless, there is no clear view about the consequences of that saved money. This paper points out,...