This paper studies a procurement problem with one buyer and multiple potential suppliers who hold private information about their own production costs. Both the purchase quantity and the price need to be determined. An optimal procurement strategy for the buyer requires the buyer to first design...

This 2006 Article IV Consultation highlights that Italy’s economy is enjoying a broad-based, if comparatively modest, cyclical upswing. Output is estimated to have grown by 1¾ percent in 2006—the strongest pace since the beginning of the decade. Inflation is close to that of the...

This paper uses a unified treatment of real options and game theory to examine value appropriation in takeovers within a competitive environment of imperfect information. The integrated model considers a potential target as a shared real option on a bundle of resources. Competing potential...

The principal aim of this paper is to select a contractor who offers the best value for money. This will nearly always involve a process of competitive tendering. The final decision as to which contractor offers the best value for money will be determined by the factors like quality/price...

Over $47 billion of tax exempt debt issues were sold to the public in 1982. A portion of this total was offered to municipal bond underwriters under a competitive bidding system using the criterion of minimum true interest cost (internal rate of return). The TIC bidding problem may be formulated...

While most models of auctions and competitive bidding assume that each bidder's utility for an outcome depends only on his own profit, we allow the utility to also depend on any regret that a bidder suffers after the fact and characterize when and how this affects bidding. Specifically, a winner...

The theory of auction design examines how various factors affect the outcome of an auction. Most of the existing literature focuses on how varying the amount of information available to each bidder affects the bid-taker's expected revenue when all other factors remain constant. This paper...

We investigate the effect of regret-related feedback information on bidding behavior in sealed-bid first-price auctions. Two types of regret are possible in this auction format. A winner of the auction may regret paying too much relative to the second highest bid, and a loser may regret missing...

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...

Bidding has been proposed to replace or complement the administered prices that Medicare pays to hospitals and health plans. In 2006, the Medicare Advantage program implemented a competitive bidding system to determine plan payments. In perfectly competitive models, plans bid their costs and...