Introduction / Nicola Dimitri, Gustavo Piga and Giancarlo Spagnolo -- The variety of procurement practice : evidence from public procurement / Laura Carpineti, Gustavo Piga and Matteo Zanza -- General strategic principles -- When should procurement be centralized? / Nicola Dimitri, Federico Dini...

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,...

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...