If firms compete in all-pay auctions with complete information, silent shareholdings introduce asymmetric externalities into the all-pay auction framework. If the strongest firm owns a large share in the second strongest firm, this may make the strongest firm abstain from bidding. As a...

We study ex post outsourcing of production in an imperfectly discriminating contest, interpreted here as a research tournament or a procurement contest for being awarded some production contract. We find that the possibility of outsourcing increases competition between the contestants, leading...

In the very popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in evaluating singing effort, have no voting power when the field is narrowed to the top twenty-four contestants. It is only the votes of viewers that count. In the 2007 season of the show, one of the...

Governments support the green transition through green public procurement. Using US data, this paper provides the first empirical analysis of the causal effects of green contracts on corporate greenhouse gas emissions and economic performance. We focus on an affirmative program for sustainable...

Public procurement contracts require frequent renegotiation. We exploit the Czech implementation of an EU policy as a natural experiment to investigate the effect of eased renegotiation rules. We document that the eased renegotiation rules decreased winning bids but did not change the final...

We investigate effects of tax reporting institutions on evasion and incidence using an experimental double auction market setting. We find that 28% of the sellers are truthful when only sellers report, but that 88% and 64% of them are truthful under costless and costly third-party reporting by...

We study the optimal entry fee in a symmetric private value first-price auction with signaling, in which the participation decisions and the auction outcome are used by an outside observer to infer the bidders' types. We show that this auction has a unique fully separating equilibrium bidding...

We investigate the impact of public procurement spending on business survival. Using Italy as a laboratory, we construct a large-scale dataset on firms–covering balance-sheet, income-statement, and administrative records–and match it with public contract data. Employing a regression...