In softening price competition at the tendering stage, a bidding ring may jeopardize the buyer's effort to award a procurement contract at her most advantageous economic conditions. By exploiting the similarities between oligopolistic and procurement markets, we discuss how structural conditions...

Using data from Italian public works, we study whether and which procuring administrations manipulate the value of contracts to avoid crossing regulatory thresholds that limit discretion, and how this impacts procurement outcomes. We use bunching estimators to document substantial manipulation...

In practical activity, the procurer can often decide to split the supply of a product in multiple contracts, or lots. This paper surveys some competitive tendering procedures for multiple contracts and discusses how the choice of the most appropriate format of competitive tendering for the...

To what extent does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better economic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works, by combining contract-level data on procurement performance and bureau-level data on competence and...

We study differently framed incentives in dynamic laboratory buyer-seller relationships with multi-tasking and endogenous matching. The experimental design tries to mitigate the role of social preferences and intrinsic motivation. Absent explicit incentives, effort is low in both tasks. Their...

Disputes over penalties for breach of contract are often solved in court. A simple model shows how inefficient courts may induce public buyers to refrain from enforcing penalties for late delivery to avoid litigation, inducing sellers to delay. Using a large dataset on Italian public...