We investigate how the functioning of public procurement is affected by the time politicians have stayed in office. We match a data set on public procurement auctions by Italian municipalities to a data set on the politics of municipal governments. For each municipality, we relate the mayor's...

In this work we compare three alternative procedures aimed at selecting a private partner in PPP projects: i.e. negotiation, auction and competitive negotiation. We show how the suitability of each of these selection mechanisms depends on many economic and institutional factors: e.g. the extent...

Using a dataset of medical devices purchased by Italian Public Buyers (PBs), for each purchase, we measure the difference between each item's price and its marginal cost. We define PBs' ability in purchasing as PBs' fixed effect (FE) on that difference. We find that average prices vary...

We study the impact of politicians' tenure in office on the outcomes of public procurement. To this purpose, we match a data set on the politics of Italian municipal governments to a data set on the procurement auctions they administered. In order to identify a causal relation, we apply two...

We study the relationship between collusion and corruption in a stylized model of repeated procurement where the cost of reporting corrupt bureaucrats gives rise to a free riding problem. As in Dixit (2015, 2016), cooperation among honest suppliers alleviates free-riding in reporting. However,...

We provide a positive analysis of the equilibrium bidding and bribing strategies with and without corruption in a first-price, sealed-bid, procurement auction with two-dimensional-type bidders. With corruption, we assume that the quality of the bidders are unobservable and non-contractible...

We compare two commonly used mechanisms in procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer s preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a precise...

In this paper, we investigate interaction between two firms engaged in a repeated procurement relationship modelled as a multiple criteria auction, and an auctioneer (a government employee) who has discretion in devising the selection criteria. A first result is that, in a one-shot context,...

We investigate the effect of corruption on competition in procurement. Our assumption is that the bureaucrat (i.e., the agent that administers the market), if corrupt, may provide an opportunity for bid readjusments in exchange for a bribe. As firms expect to be paying a bribe, a mechanical...

We study how poor quality of institution, such as corruption in public procurement auction, could hurt welfare. We show how competition effect could improve the cost-efficiency but not the quality of a public procurement auction with corruption. In fact, no incentive mechanism can be efficient...