Essays in regulation and organizational economics

The first part of the dissertation addresses questions related to the procurement decisions of private and public organizations. In particular it focuses on how the anticipation of renegotiating the contractual terms during the execution of a procurement contract affects the initial arrangements between the parties. Renegotiation may involve the design itself of the goods which are procured, and not just their price or the time of their delivery. A plausible explanation for its pervasiveness is the existence of transaction costs which prevents contracts from being complete. This is especially true for more sophisticated and customized goods, such as new infrastructures or cars' and aircrafts' parts or components. Ex-post these goods may fail to fit the buyer's specific needs and/or may exhibit flaws unforeseen at the planning stage.

In the first two chapters, I show that the anticipation of ex-post adaptations has critical implications for many procurement choices, such as that of the contractual agreement, the award mechanism, and the delegation of the design task to the suppliers. Therefore, a proper inclusion of design failures into the analysis of procurement contracts can help broaden our understanding of the wide variety of procurement modes and outcomes observed in the real world. My analysis offers an explanation for the procurement practices adopted in complex manufacturing and construction industries. Moreover, it can provide useful guidance for public procurement. Governments face tight restrictions in their choices of the procurement modes and for this reason they should carefully evaluate whether or not to adopt the best practices of the private sector.

The second part of the dissertation concerns the optimal design of an organization. In many organizations the task of evaluating an agent's performance is delegated to a third party, a supervisor, who can opportunistically misreport information. The question of how the provision of incentives in hierarchies is affected by the supervisor's opportunism is of great importance since it can improve our understanding of the internal organization of firms and can have broad applications to regulatory design.

The third chapter of the thesis, co-authored with Luca Livio (ECARES, FNRS), contributes to this line of research by studying the optimal task a supervisor should be charged with in the presence of corruption concerns. We highlight the existence of a trade-off between monitoring the agent's effort choice and auditing it ex-post, which arises when the two faces of corruption, collusion and extortion, are present.