This Paper explores how the government’s choice of renewal policy in public procurement programmes can be used as a mechanism to provide firms with incentives to supply quality. Several firms produce a public service. The firms participate in a tournament where they are ranked according to the quality of their services, and rewarded in terms of contract renewals. We analyse the firms’ incentives to produce high-quality services, and find that they are maximized if 50% of the contracts are renewed. The optimal renewal policy trades off incentive provision (which requires that a relatively large fraction of the firms are replaced each period) against the entry costs of new firms.
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
4540.
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