The paper studies first-score auctions awarded under the aggregative compensating method. We show that equilibria display various anomalies which are caused by the competitors that are unable to reach either the first or the second position in the bid ranking. While such competitors are...

This paper presents the outcome of an experiment where the standard one shot sealed bid procurement auction for two identical goods provides the benchmark. Inducing scale economies a combinatorial auction is applied on the situation with non-linear costs. The mechanisms are first run without,...

Public procurement faces the risk that the contractor goes bankrupt before the completion of the work. The possibility to declare bankruptcy makes the contractors behave more aggressively.This leads to abnormally low tenders and to the break-down of revenue equivalence. Upon this result we...

Procurement awarding mechanisms based on average price have been advocated to soften price competition and reduce cost overruns. We show that their theoretical support is shaky. When the bid closest to the average is awarded, firms submit identical bids, making the selection extremely costly and...

In a situation where firms compete for a contract of an agency and subcontract part of this contract it is shown that: (i) If the timing of subcontracting is determined by the firms,then the more efficient firms subcontract after the award, while the less efficient firms subcontract before the...

In this paper we analyse a multidimensional auction where quality scores are private information of the Public Administration (PA). We introduce a multistage procedure: in the first stage every participant submits a technical proposal, without knowing what the buyer evaluation is. In the second...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of outcomes from Swedish procurement auctions given award criterion and auction format. The auctions are single-unit sealed bid auctions or their simultaneous counterpart and contracts can be awarded to the lo west bidder or in accordance with...

We analyze sequential ascending auctions with budget cons- trained bidders and relax the standard hypothesis that bidders cannot bid above their budget. In equilibrium, a bidder may choose to overbid — i.e., bid above his budget — in an early auction in order to deplete his rival and hence...

The number and the size of lots influence the degree of competition in a tendering procedure mainly through two channels, both related to the market structure: the number of participants and their bidding behaviour. This paper discusses the relation between lots, participation, competition and...