We study the effect of the presence of a certification intermediary in an environment where information asymmetries are particularly severe. The intermediary improves the information that buyers have about quality. This in turn increases the incentives that the seller has to provide high-quality goods. Efficiency is increased by the presence of the intermediary, but quality is underprovided in equilibrium relative to full information. The intermediary can implement the optimal policy in many ways. The amount of information revealed ranges from full disclosure to partial, noisy disclosure.

No abstract

When designing a national public procurement system, the degree of centralization (or, equivalently, the degree of demand aggregation) is one of the most crucial as well as puzzling policy choices. Centralized procurement has been traditionally considered as an instrument to reduce public spending. In more recent years, though, and particularly after the 2008 global financial turmoil, a growing interest has arisen among both policy makers and researchers in government procurement as a lever to pursue broader policy goals, such as competitive markets structure, sustainable development and innovation. This paper reviews and discusses several issues related both to the rationales and to the practical implementation of centralized procurement strategies, with a particular focus on the procurement of goods and services.

No abstract

International audienceWe consider two ascending auctions for multiple objects, namely, an English and a Japanese auction, and derive a perfect Bayesian equilibrium of the Japanese auction by exploiting its strategic equivalence with the survival auction, which consists of a finite sequence of sealed-bid auctions. Thus an equilibrium of a continuous time game is derived by means of backward induction in finitely many steps. We then show that all equilibria of the Japanese auction induce equilibria of the English auction, but that many collusive or signaling equilibria of the English auction do not have a counterpart in the Japanese auctio

No abstract

Unverifiable quality may affect the enforcement of procurement contracts even when the award procedure is able to select the most efficient firm in the market. In this paper, we show that a discriminatory competitive mechanism – which awards the contract on the basis of price and (firms') past performance – yields an efficient allocation of the contract and allows the buyer to implement her desired quality. Quality enforcement arises out of relational contracting whereby the buyer ‘handicaps' a contractor in future competitive tendering processes if it fails to provide the required quality. We study an infinitely repeated procurement model with two firms and one buyer imperfectly informed on the firms' cost, in which, in each period, the buyer runs a discriminatory auction. We restrict our analysis to the case of a buyer committed to her handicapping strategy, a case which captures some of the features of a public buyer. When players use either grim trigger or stick-and-carrot strategies, we find that the buyer can induce the delivery of optimal (unverifiable) quality with a variety of handicap levels and, when applicable, durations of the punishment period; for some values of the handicap and the length of the punishment period, both firms remain active in the market even when punished

No abstract