This paper documents evidence of widespread collusion among construction firms using a novel dataset covering most of the construction projects procured by the Japanese national government from 2003 to 2006. By examining rebids that occur for auctions when all (initial) bids fail to meet the...

We study the effectiveness of firms' compliance programs by conducting a field experiment in which we disclose to a subset of Japanese firms that the firm is potentially engaging in illegal bid-rigging. We find that the information that we disclose affects the bidding behavior of the treated...

Auctioneers suspecting bidder collusion often lack the formal evidence needed for legal recourse. A practical alternative is to design auctions that hinder collusion. Since Abreu et al. (1986), economic theory has emphasized imperfect monitoring as a constraint on collusion, but evidence remains...