This Chapter builds on the argument that mitigating the allure and policy irresistibility of digital technologies requires reassessing the true potential benefits of digital technologies and, more importantly, the necessary enabling mechanisms, likely roadblocks, and new risks that come with...

The paper studies the impact of corruption threat in procurement an dpublic purchases. It explores the consequences of the unobservability of people integrity and considers the problem of both capture and extortion. It shows that extortion is not fight against because it is not harmful to the...

The frequent renegotiation of public contracts is variously attributed to collusion between officials and bidders, the desire to circumvent budgetary rules, and other factors. This column challenges the industrial organisation view of public contract renegotiation, showing that frequent...

The public health and economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed governments to substantially and swiftly increase spending. Consequently, public procurement rules have been relaxed in many places to expedite transactions. However, this may also create opportunities for...

Government contracting is rife with miscommunication and misperception, sometimes unavoidably, and is often associated with secrecy, autarky, and opportunism. These qualities undermine trust, increase contracting costs, and reduce effective collaboration between business and government. In this...

The World Bank Group, which commits tens of billions of dollars to funding projects in the developing world every year, is revising its procurement guidelines. The Bank's procurement guidelines are intended to ensure that procurements on Bank-financed projects are carried out efficiently and...

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...

This paper deals with a Niskanen type of public-procurement agency. We show that the procurement game should be separated into an investment game and a project game, the first game to be played before nature determines the actual realizations of benefit and costs of the project, the second game...

This paper develops 30 novel quantitative indicators of grand corruption that operationalize 20 distinct techniques of corruption in the context of public procurement. Each indicator rests on a thorough qualitative understanding of rent extraction from public contracts by corrupt networks as...

Although both the academic and policy communities have attached great importance to measuring corruption, most of the currently available measures are biased and too broad to test theory or guide policy. This article proposes a new composite indicator of grand corruption based on a wide range of...