Reputational incentives may be a powerful mechanism for improving supplier performance and limiting the perverse effect of price competition on contract execution. We analyze a unique experiment run by a large utility company in Italy which introduced a new vendor rating system scoring its...

The paper studies competition for the market in a setting where incumbents (and, to a lesser extent, neighboring incumbents) benefit from a cost advantage. The paper first compares the outcome of staggered and synchronous tenders, before drawing the implications for market design. We find that...