The EU procurement directives stipulate that public contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder or to the bidder with the economically most advantageous offer; the latter requiring that a scoring rule must be specified. We provide a simple theoretical framework for tender evaluation and discuss...

Despite the central role of payments in theoretical and policy oriented economics, there is surprisingly little known about the costs of different payment instruments. We estimate social and private costs of cash, debit and credit card payments in Sweden in 2002. The combined social cost of...

Two-sided network effects in card payment systems are analysed under different market structures, e.g., competition, one-sided monopoly, bilateral monopoly and duopoly; with and without an interchange fee; for the so-called Baxter's case of non-strategic and heterogenous merchants. A partial...

In this paper we evaluate whether spatial econometric techniques can be used to test for collusive bidder behavior in public procurement auctions, using the submitted bids and procurement characteristics. The proposed method is applied to the so-called Swedish asphalt cartel, which was...

The effects of price and market size variables on the investment propensities in the pulp and paper industry are analyzed. A panel of 15 European countries for the time period 1984 - 1997 is used in the regression analysis. We find that the wages, the $US/ECU$ exchange rate, the price of paper...