Juan José Ganuza

Corruption and Competition in Procurement

We consider a procurement problem in which the procurement agent is supposed to allocate the realization of a project according to a competitive mechanism that values bids in terms of the proposed price and quality. Potential bidders have private information about their production costs. Since the procurement agent is also in charge of verifying delivered quality, in exchange for a bribe, he can allow an arbitrary firm to be awarded the realization of the project and to produce a quality level lower than the announced. We compute the equilibrium level of corruption and we study the impact on corruption of the competitiveness of the environment, and in particular of: i) an increase in the number of potential suppliers of the good or service to be procured, ii) competitive (rather than collusive) behavior of procurement agents, and iii) an increase of competition in the market for procurement agents. We identify the effects that influence the equilibrium level of corruption and show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, corruption may well be increasing in competition.

SIGNAL ORDERINGS BASED ON DISPERSION AND THE SUPPLY OF PRIVATE INFORMATION IN AUCTIONS

This paper provides a novel approach to ordering signals based on the property that more informative signals lead to greater variability of conditional expectations. We define two nested information criteria (supermodular precision and integral precision) by combining this approach with two variability orders (dispersive and convex orders). We relate precision criteria with orderings based on the value of information to a decision maker. We then use precision to study the incentives of an auctioneer to supply private information. Using integral precision, we obtain two results: (i) a more precise signal yields a more efficient allocation; (ii) the auctioneer provides less than the efficient level of information. Supermodular precision allows us to extend the previous analysis to the case in which supplying information is costly and to obtain an additional finding; (iii) there is a complementarity between information and competition, so that both the socially efficient and the auctioneers optimal choice of precision increase with the number of bidders. Copyright 2010 The Econometric Society.

Ignorance promotes competition: An auction model with endogenous private valuations

We study a situation in which an auctioneer wishes to sell an object to one of N risk-neutral bidders with heterogeneous preferences. The auctioneer does not know bidders preferences but has private information about the characteristics of the object, and must decide how much information to reveal prior to the auction. We show that the auctioneer has incentives to release less information than would be efficient and that the amount of information released increases with the level of competition (as measured by the number of bidders). Furthermore, in a perfectly competitive market the auctioneer would provide the efficient level of information.

Competition and Cost Overruns in Procurement

Most cases of cost overruns in public procurement are related to important changes in the initial project design. This paper deals with the problem of design speciffication in public procurement and provides a rationale for design misspeciffication. We propose a model in which the sponsor decides how much to invest in design speciffication and awards competitively the project to a contractor. After the project has been awarded the sponsor engages in bilateral renegotiation with the contractor, in order to accommodate changes in the initial projects design that new information makes desirable. When procurement takes place in the presence of horizontally differentiated contractors, the designs speciffication level is seen to affect the resulting degree of competition. The paper highlights this interaction between market competition and design speciffication and shows that the sponsors optimal strategy, when facing an imperfectly competitive market supply, is to underinvest in design speciffication so as to make signifficant cost overruns likely. Since no such misspeciffication occurs in a perfectly competitive market, cost overruns are seen to arise as a consequence of lack of competition in the procurement market.

Regulation, Corporate Social Responsibility and Activism

This paper analyzes the interplay between firms self-regulation (often denoted as corporate social responsibility) as opposed to the formal regulation of a negative externality. Firms respond to increasing activism in the market (conscious consumers that take into account the external effects of their purchase) by providing more socially responsible goods. However, because regulation is the outcome of a political process, an increase in activism might imply an inefficiently high externality level. This may happen when a majority of non-activist consumers collectively free-ride on conscious consumers. By determining a softer than optimal regulation, they benefit from the behavior of firms, yet they have access to cheaper (although less efficient) goods.

Wild bids. Gambling for resurrection in procurement contracts

This paper analyses the problem of abnormally low tenders in the procurement process. Limited liability causes firms in a bad financial situation to bid more aggressively than financially healthy firms in the procurement auction. Therefore, it is likely that the winning firm is a firm in financial difficulties with a high risk of bankruptcy. The paper focuses on the regulatory practice of surety bonds to face this problem. We show that the use of surety bonds reduces and sometimes eliminates the problem of abnormally low tenders. We provide a characterization of the optimal surety bond and show that the U.S. practice of requiring that surety bonds cover over 100% of the contract price can be excessive, implying overinsurance to the problem of abnormally low tenders.

R&D in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A World of Small Innovations

It is commonly argued that in recent years pharmaceutical companies have directed their R&D towards small improvements of existing compounds instead of more risky drastic innovations. In this paper we show that the proliferation of these small innovations is likely to be linked to the lack of market sensitivity of a part of the demand to changes in prices. Compared to their social contribution, small innovations are relatively more profitable than large ones because they are targeted to the smaller but more inelastic part of the demand. We also study the effect of regulatory instruments such as price ceilings, copayments and reference prices and extend the analysis to competition in research

On Information and Competition in Private Value Auctions

How much information does an auctioneer want bidders to have in a private value environment? We address this question using a novel approach to ordering information structures based on the property that in private value settings more information leads to a more disperse distribution of buyers’ updated expected valuations. We define the class of precision criteria following this approach and different notions of dispersion, and relate them to existing criteria of informativeness. Using supermodular precision, we obtain three results: (1) a more precise information structure yields a more efficient allocation; (2) the auctioneer provides less than the efficient level of information since more information increases bidder informational rents; (3) there is a strategic complementarity between information and competition, so that both the socially efficient and the auctioneer’s optimal choice of precision increase with the number of bidders, and both converge as the number of bidders goes to infinity.

Limited Liability and Mechanism Design in Procurement

In the presence of cost uncertainty, limited liability introduces the possibility of default in procurement with its associated bankruptcy costs. When financial soundness is not perfectly observable, we show that incentive compatibility implies that financially less sound contractors are selected with higher probability in any feasible mechanism. Informational rents are associated with unsound financial situations. By selecting the financially weakest contractor, stronger price competition (auctions) may not only increase the probability of default but also expected rents. Thus, weak conditions are sufficient for auctions to be supoptimal. In particular, we show that pooling firms with higher assets may reduce the cost of procurement even when default is costless for the sponsor.

Realistic Standards: Optimal Negligence with Limited Liability

We study the standard economic model of unilateral accidents under the assumption that the injurers have limited assets. We identify a second‐best optimal rule that selects as due care the minimum of first‐best care and a level of care that takes into account the wealth of the injurer. We show that such a rule in fact maximizes the precautionary effort by a potential injurer. The idea is counterintuitive: being softer on an injurer, in terms of the required level of care, actually improves the incentives when he or she is potentially insolvent. We extend the basic result to an entire population of potentially insolvent injurers and find that the optimal general standards of care do depend on wealth and the distribution of income. We also show that, under certain conditions, wealthier populations should be subject to higher general standards of care in the case of accidents.