A seminal result in the theory of competitive bidding holds that the buyer can lower the expected awarding price of a procurement contract by setting a reserve price below her opportunity cost for realizing the project. In this paper, we first provide a non-technical explanation for this result,...

This paper represents one of the first attempts to benchmarking public procurement practices for the same product categories. Questionnaires from European procurement agencies provide several insights on procurement contest design and on participation and competition patterns of two important...

Procurement procedures are made of many distinct parts, on which the buyer can intervene to adapt the process to the product, service or work that he wants to procure. This paper analyses differences and similarities among public procurement practices adopted worldwide. Results are based on data...