We study a situation in which an auctioneer wishes to sell an object to one of N risk-neutral bidders with heterogeneous preferences. The auctioneer does not know bidders' preferences but has private information about the characteristics of the object, and must decide how much information to...

We analyze the impact of different types of international conventions that require signatory countries to penalize domestic firms that are found to have bribed foreign public officials. We analyze enforcement of penalties under a convention styled after the OECD's 'Convention on Combating...

Most cases of cost overruns in public procurement are related to important changes in the initial project design. This paper deals with the problem of design specification in public procurement and provides a rationale for design misspecification. We propose a model in which the sponsor decides...

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...

We study bureaucratic corruption in a model in which a constituency sets required levels for a given set of activities. Activities are carried out by external providers who are supervised by bureaucrats. Bureaucrats can allow providers to deliver lower activity levels than contracted in exchange...

We develop a stylized model of horizontal and vertical competition in tournaments with two competing firms. The sponsor cares about the quality of the design but also about the design location. A priori not even the sponsor knows his preferred design location, which is only discovered once he...

This paper analyzes the problem of abnormally low tenders in the procurement process. Limited liability causes firms in a bad financial situation to bid more aggressively than good firms in the procurement auction. Therefore, it is more likely that the winning firm is a firm in financial...

Spanish Abstract: El trabajo presenta un primer análisis de los instrumentos de intervención sobre los contratos en relación con la perturbación provocada por la pandemia del COVID-19. Se identifica el problema más acuciante sobre el conjunto de las relaciones contractuales en vigor: la...

Most cases of cost overruns in public procurement are related to important changes in the initial project design. This paper deals with the problem of design speciffication in public procurement and provides a rationale for design misspeciffication. We propose a model in which the sponsor...

We consider the impact of recruitment and training policies for the incentives of agents with career concerns. Training can be targeted, that is it has (or is chosen to have) more of an impact on particular types of agents and recruitment techniques can focus on finding superstars or weeding out...