Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Bidder Asymmetry in Infrastructure Procurement: Are There any Fringe Bidders?

Bidder Asymmetry in Infrastructure Procurement: Are There any Fringe Bidders? Asymmetric auctions are among the most rapidly growing areas in the auction literature. The potential benefits from intensified auction competition could be enormous in the public procurement context. Entrant bidders are considered a key to enhance competition and break potential collusive arrangements among incumbent bidders. Asymmetric auction theory predicts that weak (fringe) bidders would bid more aggressively when they are faced with a strong (incumbent) opponent. Using data from official development projects, this paper shows that entrants actually submitted aggressive bids in the presence of incumbent(s) in the road sector and to a certain extent in the water sector. For electricity projects, the general competition effect is found to be particularly significant, but the entrant effect remains unclear. The results suggest that auctioneers should foster competition in public procurement, including fringe bidders, to contain public infrastructure investment costs. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Review of Industrial Organization Springer Journals

Bidder Asymmetry in Infrastructure Procurement: Are There any Fringe Bidders?

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/bidder-asymmetry-in-infrastructure-procurement-are-there-any-fringe-8q16ze3ygS

References (39)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Subject
Economics; Industrial Organization; Microeconomics
ISSN
0889-938X
eISSN
1573-7160
DOI
10.1007/s11151-010-9242-z
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Asymmetric auctions are among the most rapidly growing areas in the auction literature. The potential benefits from intensified auction competition could be enormous in the public procurement context. Entrant bidders are considered a key to enhance competition and break potential collusive arrangements among incumbent bidders. Asymmetric auction theory predicts that weak (fringe) bidders would bid more aggressively when they are faced with a strong (incumbent) opponent. Using data from official development projects, this paper shows that entrants actually submitted aggressive bids in the presence of incumbent(s) in the road sector and to a certain extent in the water sector. For electricity projects, the general competition effect is found to be particularly significant, but the entrant effect remains unclear. The results suggest that auctioneers should foster competition in public procurement, including fringe bidders, to contain public infrastructure investment costs.

Journal

Review of Industrial OrganizationSpringer Journals

Published: Feb 21, 2010

There are no references for this article.