Transparency, Recuitment and Retention in the Public Sector

Although performance measurement systems are likely to have significant recruitment and retention consequences these have received much less attention that the individual incentive effects. This paper explores these recruitment and retention consequences in organizations, such as those in the public sector, which are characterized by rigidities in pay. We clarify when performance measurement increases the cost of recruiting and retaining public sector employees and when it does not. Within the same framework, we also show that traditional practices such as tenure based pay and ports of entry can be rationalized as an optimal response to rigidities in pay.performance measurement, disclosure, sorting, wage compression, public sector

On some collusive and signaling equilibria in ascending auctions for multiple objects

We consider two ascending auctions for multiple objects: the SEAMO (simultaneous English auction for multiple objects) and the the JAMO (Japanese auction for multiple objects). We first derive a (competitive) Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium of the JAMO by exploiting the strategic equivalence between the JAMO and the Survival Auction which consists of a finite sequence of sealed-bid auctions. Then, we prove that many of the (unwanted) collusive or signaling equilibria studied in the literature in the framework of the SEAMO do not have a counterpart in the JAMO. However, it is shown that certain collusive equilibria based on retaliatory strategies do exist in both auctions.Multi-unit auctions; Ascending auctions; FCC auctions; Collusion; Retaliation

Bidding for Complex Projects: Evidence From the Acquisitions of IT Services

Competitive bidding (as auctions) is commonly used to procure goods and services. Public buyers are often mandated by law to adopt competitive procedures to ensure transparency and promote full competition. Recent theoretical literature, however, suggests that open competition can perform poorly in allocating complex projects. In exploring the determinants of suppliers’ bidding behavior in procurement auctions for complex IT services, we find results that are consistent with theory. We find that price and quality do not exhibit the classical tradeoff one would expect: quite surprisingly, high quality is associated to low prices. Furthermore, while quality is mainly driven by suppliers’ experience, price is affected more by the scoring rule and by the level of expected competition. These results might suggest that (scoring) auctions fail to appropriately incorporate buyers’ complex price/quality preferences in the tender design.Procurement Auctions, Scoring Rules, IT Contracts, Price/Quality Ratio

The Determinants of Suppliers’ Performance in E-Procurement: Evidence from the Italian Government’s E-Procurement Platform

Participation of small businesses in the market for public contracts is widely recognized as a key policy issue. It is also commonly held that the adoption of e-procurement solutions can be effective in pursuing such an objective. To this end, we analyze the transactions completed in the period 2004-2007 through the Italian Government’s e-procurement platform, that is, the marketplace managed by the Italian Public Procurement Agency (Consip S.p.A.). Although descriptive statistics indicate that micro suppliers are the most represented group of firms in the marketplace, our econometric treatment provides some evidence that the former are less successful than all other suppliers in getting public contracts. Degree of loyalty with buyers, location and the use of other MEPA negotiation tools, also emerge as relevant factors of success in the e-procurement market.E-Procurement, Small Suppliers, Request For Quotations, Performance, Public Contracts, Count Data

Provision of quality and certification intermediaries

If buyers do not observe the quality of a product and production of quality is costly, market allocations can be very inefficient. Certification intermediaries are institutions that provide information about quality to buyers. The amount of information in the market determines the incentives that producers have to provide high quality goods. In this paper, we model information revelation as a strategic variable of intermediaries. The amount of disclosed information is shown to deeply influence both the intermediary's profits and the distribution of quality produced in equilibrium. We show that a monopoly intermediary will provide noisy signals of quality and that the quality produced in equilibrium is the same as the one that would be chosen by a monopsonistic buyer who optimally designs a mechanism. Efficiency is increased by the intermediary but less quality is produced in equilibrium than under complete information

Flexible Strategies for Centralized Public Procurement

oai:ojs.www.rei.unipg.it:article/17When 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

A Class of All-pay Auctions with Affiliated Information

We study an auction mechanism combining the war of attrition and the all-pay auction under the assumption that buyers' signals are affiliated. We provide a sufficient condition which guarantees the existence of a symmetric, increasing equilibrium bidding strategy, but rules out full extraction of buyers' surplus by the seller. We develop revenue comparison between the combined mechanism, the war of attrition and the all-pay auction.All-pay auctions, War of Attrition, Affilliated values

Sunshine vitamin and thyroid

Vitamin D exerts its canonical roles on the musculoskeletal system and in the calcium/phosphorus homeostasis. In the last years, increasing evidences suggested several extra-skeletal actions of this hormone, indicating that vitamin D may produce effects in almost all the body tissues. These are mediated by the presence of vitamin D receptor (VDR) and thanks to the presence of the 1-α-hydroxylase, the protein that converts the 25-hydroxyvitamin (calcidiol) to the active form 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin (calcitriol). Several studies evaluated the possible role of vitamin D in the pathogenesis of thyroid diseases, and this review will focus on the available data of the literature evaluating the association between vitamin D and thyroid function, vitamin D and autoimmune thyroid diseases, including Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease and post-partum thyroiditis, and vitamin D and thyroid cancer

Scoring rules in experimental procurement

We report the results of an experiment where subjects compete for procurement contracts to be awarded by means of a scoring auction. Two experimental conditions are considered, depending on the relative weight of quality vs price in the scoring rule. We show that different quality-price weights dramatically alter the strategic environment and affect efficiency. Our evidence shows that each weighting better delivers against a matching objective function than using a scoring rule which misrepresents the buyer's objective function. Nonetheless, there are large deviations in how each performs, with the higher weight on quality delivering much greater efficiency evaluated against its own objective function than a low weight on quality evaluated against its own objective function, despite the higher quality weight inducing higher deviations from equilibrium. We propose a “mediation analysis” to show that the “direct effect” (due to the different strategic properties of the induced game-forms) outweighs the “indirect” one (how the different game-forms affect out-of-equilibrium behaviour). We also perform a structural estimation of the Quantal Response Equilibrium induced by subjects’ behavior, where we find that subjects are risk averse and noisy play affects behavior in the direction of underbidding.Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Grant PID2022-142356NB-I00) and Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo/2021/073 and Research Groups 3/086) is gratefully acknowledged

Synthesis of new bis[1-(thiophenyl)propynones] as potential organic dyes for colorless luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs)

New luminophores having different aryl nuclei and propynones moieties have been obtained via Sonogashira reactions. Their optical properties were evaluated and indicated that carbonyl groups are responsible for significant bathochromic effects and high Stokes shifts. The insertion of -OMe groups on the central benzene unit gives to the fluorophore high optical efficiency (7.7%) when homogeneously dispersed in a poly(cyclohexyl methacrylate) (PCMA) film and connected to a PV cell