Fostering whistleblowing through leniency and asymmetric sanctions is regarded as a potentially powerful anti-corruption strategy in the light of its success in busting cartels. The US Department of Justice started a pilot program of this kind in 2016. It has been argued, however, that...

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...

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...

We test the overarching hypothesis that financial institutions face relatively milder fines due to financial stability concerns. To do so, we use an event study approach on a sample of 441 listed cartel members prosecuted by the European Commission between 1998 and June 2020. Our results suggest...

Whistleblower rewards have been used extensively in the US to limit procurement fraud and tax evasion, and their use has been extended to fight financial fraud after the recent financial crisis. There is currently a debate on their possible introduction in Europe, but authorities there appear...

Reputational incentives may be a powerful mechanism for improving supplier performance. We analyze their role in contract awarding, exploiting an experiment run by a firm which introduced a new vendor rating system scoring suppliers' past performance and linking it to the award of future...

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 workforce...

Quality and suppliers performance are essential for procurement. This Paper analyses these important issues from two perspectives. The first part deals with the topic of contracting. It describes the features of some common types of contracts that the buyer may choose according to the...