Combinatorial auctions are promising auction formats for industrial and public procurement. Potential advantages of using combinatorial auctions include lower overall spend, low transaction costs for multi-item negotiations, fairness and market transparency for suppliers, as well as high allocative efficiency. A number of fundamental design considerations are relevant to the application of comb...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have described expenditures for antiretroviral (ARV) medicines in Brazil through 2005. While prior studies examined overall expenditures, they have not have analyzed drug procurement data in order to describe the role of court litigation on access and pricing. METHODS ARV drug procurement from private sector sources for the years 2004-2011 was obtained through the ...

This paper addresses the issue of favoritism at the design stage of complex procurement auctions. A local community of citizens wants to procure a complex good or project and lacks the ability to translate its preferences into operational technical specifications. This task is delegated to a public officer who may collude with one of the firms at the design stage of the procurement auction in e...

Available online 25 February 2012