The European Union's Council Regulation (EC) No 1698/2005 on support for rural development by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development has introduced promising changes in rewarding farmers by the implementation of conservation auctions and granting farmers' transaction costs. The...

The mandatory deposit for one-way drinks packaging, embodied in the German Packaging Ordinance of 1991, entered into force in January 2003, after the condition for its implementation was given by the fall of the market share of reusable drinks packaging under 72% in 1997. In this context the...

When procurement contracts are awarded through competitive tendering participating firms commit ex ante to fulfil a set of contractual duties. However, selected contractors may find profitable to renege ex post on their promises by opportunistically delivering lower quality standards. In order...

We introduce the groupwise-pivotal referral (GPR) mechanism for auctions where buyers can participate only through referrals. Each buyer's type consists of a valuation and referable buyers. Unlike the second-price auction (SPA), the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism provides referral...

When procurement contracts are awarded through competitive tendering participating firms commit ex ante to fulfil a set of contractual duties. However, selected contractors may find profitable to renege ex post on their promises by opportunistically delivering lower quality standards. In order...

This paper examines the conventional wisdom, expressed in McAfee and McMillan's (1987) widely cited survey paper on auctions, that links increased variance of bidder values to increased information rent. We find that although the conventional wisdom does indeed hold in their (1986) model of a...

Motivated by challenges facing IT procurement, this paper studies a hybrid procurement model where a reverse auction of a fixed-price IT outsourcing contract may be followed by renegotiation to extend the contract's scope. In this model, the buyer balances the need to incentivize...

Large infrastructure projects are a major responsibility of government, who usually lacks expertise to fully specify the demanded projects. Contractors, typically experts on such projects, advise of the needed design in their bids. Producing the right design is nevertheless costly. We model the...

I study a market where agents with jointly owned heterogeneous goods trade subject to the constraint that each agent ends up with one good. In this market the existence of an efficient, incentive compatible, individually rational and budget balanced mechanism depends on the shares of the agents....

Suppliers often make proactive investments in capacity to strategically position themselves to win a contract with a monopolist buyer. Such investments reduce the suppliers' variable costs of serving the buyer's demand. We show that an auction mechanism does not always benefit the...