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...

Cost overrun is ubiquitous in public procurement. We argue that this can be the result of a constraint optimal award procedure when the procurer cannot commit not to renegotiate. If cost differences are more pronounced for more complex designs, it is optimal to fix a simple design ex ante and to...

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...

Discriminatory programs that favor local and small firms in government procurement are common in many countries. This paper studies the long-run impact of procurement discrimination on market structure and future competition in industries where learning-by-doing makes incumbent firms more...

Centralization of public procurement can lower prices for the government's direct purchase of goods and services. This paper focuses on indirect savings. Public administrations that do not procure directly through a central procurement agency might benefit from the availability of...

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...

Approximately 42% of European public procurement contracts are awarded to a sole bidder. As this market represents about one-seventh of GDP in developed countries, any inefficiency is a first-order concern. This paper examines a Czech reform that prohibited awarding such single-bid contracts....

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...

The second-generation GSM spectrum auction in Germany is probably the most clear cut example of a low price outcome in a simultaneous ascending-bid auction.The present paper gives an account of the events, describes the auction rules and market conditions, and provides a theoretical explanation...

Until recently, government procurement bidding processes have generally favored domestic firms by awarding the contract to a domestic firm even if a foreign firm tenders a lower bid, so long as the difference between the two is sufficiently small. This has been replaced by an agreement...