The Effect of Discretion on Procurement Performance

Corruption and competition in procurement auctions

We investigate the effect of corruption on competition in procurement. Our assumption is that the bureaucrat (i.e., the agent that administers the market), if corrupt, may provide an opportunity for bid readjusments in exchange for a bribe. As firms expect to be paying a bribe, a mechanical effect of corruption is to increase the contract price by an amount corresponding to the anticipated brib...

Corruption and Competition in Public Market Auctions

This paper investigates the effect of corruption on competition in government procurement auctions. Our assumption is that the bureaucrat (i.e. the agent that administers the market), if corrupt, may provide a favor in exchange for a bribe. The favor we consider in most of our analysis is the opportunity to readjust a bid. We show that a key effect of corruption is to facilitate collusion in pr...

Evaluating Discretion in Government Procurement

Government procurement contracts generally garner a small number of bids, and it is not uncommon for only one bid to be considered. This paper quantifies multiple factors determining the extent of competition observed in the United States federal procurement data for commercially unavailable IT and telecommunications service contracts. We develop, identify, and estimate a principal-agent model ...

Decentralisation and Management of Human Resource for Health in the Health System of Ghana: A Decision Space Analysis

Background The implications of decentralisation on human resource for health management has not received adequate research attention despite the presupposition that the concept of decentralisation leads to the transfer of management authority and discretion for human resource management from national levels to subnational levels. This study aims at investigating the extent to which decent...

The Fear of Discretion in Government Procurement