In government procurement auctions of construction contracts, entrants are typically less informed and bid more aggressively than incumbent firms. This bidding behavior makes them more susceptible to losses a¤ecting their prospect of survival. In April of 2000, the Oklahoma Department of...

In an effort to accommodate a change in the U.S. Federal Highway Administration's goals towards "race-neutral methods" concerning the involvement of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises in procurement contracting, the Texas Department of Transportation created a Learning, Information, Networking...

This paper examines bidding behavior in a setting where post-bid-letting project modifications occur. These modifications change both the costs and payouts to the winning contractor, making the contract incomplete. Recent empirical research shows that bidders incorporate the likelihood of such...

In this article, we revisit Zipf's law and test the rank-size rule on US cities for different periods of time and city limits. We show that Zipf 's law holds more closely for urban places in 1900 and recently, in 1990 and 2000, for metropolitan areas. With the evolution of the modern city, the...

We examine bidding in a rare book sequential auction that has features of a natural experiment: lots were arranged in alphabetical order, the reserve set non-strategically and half the bids placed by mail-in bidders. We distinguish between the effects induced by the print order of the catalogue...