Public agencies rely on two key modes to procure goods and services: auctions and direct negotiations. The relative advantages of these two modes are still imperfectly understood. This paper therefore studies public procurement of regional passenger railway services in Germany, where regional...

Many organizations use procurement tenders to buy large amounts of goods and services. Especially in the public sector the use of these reverse auctions has grown rapidly over the past decades. For the (reverse) unit price auction experience as well as theory have shown that they can attract...

This paper assesses the effects of changes in scoring weights in auctions, using a unique sample of biddings of private Welfare-to-Work (WTW) organizations to reintegrate groups of unemployed and disabled workers. WTW-organizations did not only bid on prices, but also received points for three...

The first part of the paper reports the results from a sequence of laboratory experiments comparing the bidding behavior for multiple contracts in three different sealed bid auction mechanisms; first-price simultaneous, first-price sequential and first-price combinatorial bidding. The design of...

Public agencies rely on two key modes to procure goods and services: auctions and direct negotiations. The relative advantages of these two modes are still imperfectly understood. This paper therefore studies public procurement of regional passenger railway services in Germany, where regional...

The competitive bid process used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to procure food supplies and transportation services for humanitarian food aid is subject to bidder gaming that can increase prices and deter competition. Additionally, suppliers and carriers are matched after bid...

This paper studies the role of communication and reputation in market interactions using data from online procurement auctions. Not only positive reputation ratings but also engaging in communication increases a bidder’s probability of winning the auction. Messages are primarily used to reduce...

Bidders in procurement auctions often face avoidable fixed costs. This can make bidding decisions complex and risky, and market outcomes volatile. If bidders deviate from risk neutral best responses, either due to faulty optimization or risk attitudes, then equilibrium predictions can perform...

We study the effects of politics on public procurement in Swedish municipalities in 1990-98 using data on cleaning services. No procuring municipality committed to a standard auction format or to an explicit scoring rule. Political identity of the governing party is not correlated with the...