Pier Angelo Mori

THE ECONOMICS OF PROCUREMENT CONTRACT AWARDING: PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

The main aim of this paper is to review some of the newest and most promising advances in auction theory with an eye to applications to procurement practice. Here we focus in particular on four topics related to multidimensional auctions: 1) how to define a proper scoring rule when the awarding bodies lack the necessary information regarding its own preferences and suppliers’ technology; 2) how to cope with the information disclosure policy regarding the discretional evaluation of some aspects of each contractual proposal; 3) how to use contractors’ reputations based on their past performance in the awarding process; 4) how to control the risk of collusion and corruption in the awarding phase.

Economic Models of Trade Unions

Part 1 Unions as organizations: the microeconomic theory of the trade union, J.Oswald labour union objectives and collective bargaining, D.H.Blair and D.L.Crawford union wages, temporary layoffs and seniority, G.M.Grossman the determination of the union status of workers, H.S.Farbe. Part 2 Union/employers relations: longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions, R.B.Freeman wage bargaining and employment, I.M.McDonald and R.M.Solow trade unions and optimal labour contracts, H.Horrn and L.E.O.Svensson testing the efficiency of employment contracts, J.N.Brown and O.Ashenfelter bargaining and strikes, G.Hart an investigation into the determinants of US strike activity, J.S.Tracy. Part 3 Unions and macroeconomic performance: unemployment, G.J.Blanchard and L.H.Summers long-term unemployment and macroeconomic policy, A.Lindberg and D.J.Snower macroecomic stabilization policy and trade union behaviour as a repeated game, J.Driffill the rise in unemployment - a multi-country study, C.R.Bean et al the regulation of inflation and unemployment, E.Tarantelli.

On Incomplete Information and the Emergence of Trade Unions

The paper addresses the problem of union formation as outcome of a bargaining process. While previous contributions stress the role of production technology, here we argue that information asymmetries have a role of their own in the emergence of unions. To this purpose we study a model where workers are less informed than their employers on individual productivity but firm performance is public information. The latter is valuable to them but they can exploit it in no other way than by facing the firm united. Unions are thus established with the aim to take advantage of information that is useless to their members if they bargain separately. JEL Classification Numbers: 026, 830

Promotion careers with multiple punitive assignments

Abstract We explore conditions under which single-punishment promotion careers fail as effort incentives and must be replaced by multiple-punishment ones.

The role of employers' authority when jobs are partially enforceable

Abstract The paper extends Simons notion of authority to the case of partial job enforceability and shows that, besides allowing the adjustment of jobs to the state of the world, it is also useful as a device for the control of worker shirking.

Pricing and Price Regulation in a Customer-Owned Monopoly

In the first part of the paper we study the pricing policies of a customer-owned firm in the absence of external regulation. The profit-sharing rule is a key element of the price choice and our analysis focuses on the two most common ones, uniform and proportional. The main result is that the self-discipline effect generally ensures the dominance of customer-ownership over investor-ownership in welfare terms, though under neither rule it is enough to attain the first-best in equilibrium. Then, customer-owned firms, like forprofit ones, need some external price regulation. In the second part we address this topic. We show first that the optimal regulatory policies for investor-owned service providers are not optimal for customerowned ones, and hence price regulation is affected by the ownership mode. Another factor that is shown to condition the effectiveness of regulation is the sharing rule. The paper closes with a few results on the optimal regulatory design for customer-owned firms.

Una teoria istituzionalista dell'impresa sociale capitalistica

The paper investigates the economic functions of the capitalist social firm. To this purpose we develop an extension of Hansmann’s theory of non-profit firms that is applicable to firms that are not controlled by patrons. The analysis reveals the conditions under which donor-owned non-profit organizational forms are efficient for non-profit enterprises. Finally, we ask in which sectors they are more likely to emerge with reference principally to Italy.