This paper analyses multi-period regulation or procurement policies under asymmetric information between the regulator and regulated firms. As well known in the literature, some degree of separation is always optimal under any form of commitment. In contrast, we show that full pooling is optimal...

A government delegates a build-operate-transfer project to a private firm. In the contracting stage, the operating cost is unknown. The firm can increase the likelihood of facing a low cost, rather than a high cost, by exerting costly effort when building the infrastructure. Once this is in...

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of repeated procurements made by public sector customers from the same supplier. The previous surveys of “relational contracts” gave different explanations for the possible implications of such repeated procurements, but those surveys dealt mostly with...

The literature on public procurement pays great attention to the rules underlying tendering procedures as well as on the specification of the type of contract to be awarded. Less attention has been paid to the incompleteness of the contract; this issue is relevant in the public work sector...

Therefore, to give greater assurance that the public benefit of the gift will be consistent with the claimed deduction, the donee should be required to certify that it has selected the easement consistent with its mission and it has both the resources to manage and enforce the restriction and a...

We build on the existing literature in Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to analyze the main incentive issues in PPPs and the shape of optimal contracts in those contexts. We present a basic model of procurement in a multi-task environment in which a risk averse fi rm chooses non-contractible e...

Reducing socioeconomic health inequalities is a key goal of most health systems. When care providers are paid prospectively, e.g., by a fixed sum per patient, existing inequalities may be sustained by the incentives to undertreat relatively unhealthy patients. To counter this, prospective...

PPPs have been implemented broadly around the world in the infrastructure sector -water and sanitation, transports, energy, and telecommunications- and, more recently, in the provision of public services -education, health, prisons, and water and waste management. Key aspects of the contract...

Delegation is a key feature of political decision making: Mayors or prime ministers delegate to subordinates, voters delegate to elected representatives. We analyze the effect of political delegation on public service provision and the choice between private or public providers when contracts...