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This paper aims to examine the link between the corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication efforts of companies and their ability to obtain public procurement contracts.

The authors are exploiting a database with the number of public procurement contracts won by SBF 120 companies in France and a constructed CSR index over the period of 2007–2015. The authors provide estimates of the amount of public contracts won by those companies.

The results suggest a striking influence of CSR communication on the ability of firms to win contracts.

This study focused on the case of the SBF 120 companies under the French regulatory system and European directives, which are different from the obligations in North American countries. Second, our constructed CSR index may be too simplistic in nature, and its application is limited only to the French context. Third, we do not have any evidence about the efficiency of well-ranked firms in our study. CSR reporting is still considered to be a form of communication, even if formal, that can contain information that does not especially reflect reality, as the scandals of several companies have shown in recent years (e.g. Volkswagen, Eiffage, Enron).

Companies should consider Business-to-Government (B-to-G) market when investing in CSR actions.

This is one of the first empirical studies measuring the impact of CSR on the ability of companies to win public contracts.

The aim of this case study is to review the in-depth (and successful) investigation carried out in 2016 by the Italian Competition Authority [Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM)] on a nation-wide (multi-lot) framework agreement for consulting services. We also critically assess the tender design and emphasize which dimensions may have facilitated the uncovered anticompetitive agreement.

The case study borrows from the official Antitrust Authorities’ findings and from the tender documents to paint a comprehensive picture of the cartel’s strategy.

The case study emphasizes that AGCM’s the “conjectured logic” of the cartel’s behaviour (endogenous evidence) did coincide with those pieces of evidence seized by police forces for criminal crimes at the cartel members’ premises (exogeneous evidence). This infrequent feature of bidding rings investigations underlines the importance of theoretical as well as practical analyses of cartels’ behaviour in public procurement markets.

As the antitrust investigation was triggered by a confidential report sent by the awarding authority (Consip, the Italian national central purchasing body), the case study also emphasizes the importance of informal as well as formal co-operation between awarding authorities, especially central purchasing bodies, and competition authorities.

The case study belongs to a small set of applied research papers attempting at building a bridge between public procurement design, particularly of sizeable framework agreements, and the mechanisms devised by cartels to “game” procurement procedures. All this is accomplished by looking at all design dimensions that were exploited by cartel’s members.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the concentration of a specific customer type – governmental customer, affects the pricing of audit services in the USA.

This paper applies a standard audit pricing model by regressing audit fees on governmental customer concentration and other common determinants of audit fees. This paper also adopts an instrumental variable approach and performs propensity-score matched sample analyzes to mitigate the potential endogeneity problem.

Using data from major customer disclosures of US publicly listed firms from 2000 to 2014, this paper finds that governmental customer concentration is positively associated with audit fees, suggesting that a higher level of governmental customer concentration increases a firm’s audit risks and audit effort. In addition, this paper performs cross-sectional analyzes and show that the association between governmental customer concentration and audit fees is more pronounced for firms with weak internal governance, weak external monitoring and high financial risks.

This paper furthers the understanding of the interactive relationships in supply chain systems and adds new evidence to the literature on customer concentration. Prior studies on customer concentration typically treat all customer types in a uniform manner. To the knowledge, this is the first study that separates governmental customers from other types of customers in an audit pricing setting. The findings highlight the importance of examining governmental customer concentration when assessing a firm’s audit risks and audit fees.

Because of the renewed interest in public purchasing and the strategic use of public funds under the requirements of sustainable development, the question arose once again as to how to curb the fall of institutional quality once criteria other than price are inserted into the decision-making in public purchasing. E-procurement has been repeatedly named as one of the most efficient tools to that effect and the present paper sets out to discover whether the implementation of e-procurement in a particular country per se entails also higher institutional quality, allowing for a wider implementation of green and sustainable procurement at the national, regional and municipal level without the fear of worsening the country’s institutional quality. By analyzing the implementation of e-procurement in Denmark, the Netherlands and in Portugal, this paper aims to verify the hypothesis that the implementation of e-procurement implies better institutions in terms of public purchasing. As such, the conclusions will be used in further research on the prerequisites for a successful implementation of green public procurement across the European Union.

Gathering data on institutional quality of three early e-procurement adopters (Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal) allows for comparison of institutional quality pre- and post-e-procurement implementation. By using difference-in-differences comparison the paper seeks to answer the question how doesmandatory e-procurement influence institutional quality on the national level.

The paper finds that the reform is generally associated with a relatively stronger control of corruption in the Netherlands and Denmark, while a similar reform in Portugal failed to translate into a stronger control of corruption. Furthermore, while using the quality of regulation as a dependent variable, a positive and robust effect on the quality of regulation in Denmark was shown, while the quality of reputation in the Netherlands and Portugal declined in the post-reform period, with the drop in the quality of regulation in Portugal being considerably greater, a two-fold higher amount than the estimated drop in the Netherlands. The paper suggests that in spite of the same aims, the reform yielded substantially different or even opposing effects compared to Denmark.

By examining three examples of early adopters, further research with broader impact is needed to deduce general implications for e-procurement implementation. Furthermore, implementation of e-procurement at the regional or local level can also yield distinct results.

Understanding the actual impact of e-procurement on institutional quality is indispensable for further study on the matter. The present study argues that e-procurement needs to be accompanied by additional measures or variables to yield a positive impact on institutional quality in public procurement.

As to originality, the present paper uses a law and economics approach, originating or better said drawing motivation from green public procurement concerns, trying to provide an insight in terms of tools that can be used to eliminate concerns regarding institutional quality when implementing green public procurement practices.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the economic and legal rationale for the use of the competitive dialogue in complex procurement. The authors use the data set of public contracts awarded by European Union (EU) member states between 2010 and 2017 to analyse its usage patterns. In particular, the authors identify the types of contracting authorities that mainly use the procedure, the sectors and contract characteristics and the role of institutional factors related to the country’s perceived corruption and level of innovativeness.

The authors discuss economic and legal issues in the use of the competitive dialogue. The authors use a data set of public contracts awarded by EU member states, published on the EU’s public procurement portal Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) to analyse usage patterns and explore the types of contracting authorities that use the procedure, the sectors and type of tenders. The data covers a sample of 1.242.090 observations, which relates to all the contract award notices published on TED in the period 2010-2017 for all the 28 European member states. A probit model is used as a methodology.

The empirical analysis reveals that the use of competitive value is greater for larger value contracts, for national rather than local authorities, for the supply of other manufactured products and machinery; for research and development and business, as well as information technology services; and for construction works. The level of perceived corruption and the gross domestic product/capita do not have explanatory power in the use of the procedure, whilst a country’s degree of innovativeness, as measured by the global innovation index, positively affects the probability of adopting the procedure. A decreasing trend in the use of competitive dialogue over time is observed.

In conclusion, the countries examined benefited from a long tradition of public–private partnerships (PPPs) and from a transposition of the 2004 directive, able to provide an inclusive interpretation of complexity, and therefore, stimulate the adoption of the competitive dialogue in different sectors. Conversely, the countries, which postponed a concrete transposition and the overcoming of the confusing concept of complexity, limited the scope for the application of competitive dialogue, relying on the easier alternative: the negotiated procedure. Those circumstances lead to visible difficulties in stimulating the adoption of the procedure even in the traditional sectors; indeed, only with the new directive’s provisions a slight change in the trend can be seen.

To foster the use of the competitive dialogue in countries that have so far used it to a limited extent is important to improve upon the definition of complexity and learn from the experience of the top usage countries, as identified in the analysis.

Helping the use of the procedure may facilitate the procurement of complex contracts such as PPPs, and thus, ease the building and management of public infrastructures for the provision of public services.

The authors are not aware of previous studies that have used the TED data set and studied the law in a number of European countries so as to understand the usage patterns for the competitive dialogue.

Healthy and safety food issues are more and more becoming the purchasing process core of conscious consumer. “Type 1” wheat flour means higher protein and ash content. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attributes usually referred to the characteristics of wheat flour known to consumers and at implementing a predictive model of purchasing that allows to make correct decisions without the necessary experience of a real human expert.

In order to investigate the research aims of the paper, an online survey was carried out and conducted by means of the Google Forms in the detection time January-April 2016. The online survey collected responses from 467 Italian respondents asked to give feedback about their buying habits of various types of flour. The responses were analyzed through a data mining approach. This paper implements predictive analytics to create a statistical model of future behavior by means of a machine learning algorithms.

In line with recent healthy and dynamic trends in the food industry, conscious consumer seems to be willing to pay a price for “type 1” wheat flour that is four times higher than the price related to the basic types of wheat flour.

Consumer seems not to know well the “type 1” wheat flour and its healthy characteristics; then, it should be crucial to implement promotional strategies and marketing hand in hand. Promotion can be a key element in putting across the health benefits of special kinds of wheat flour.

Highlighting health issues about the “type 1” wheat flour gives insights and sheds some light on the crucial need of changing eating and purchasing behavior. Then, originality of this paper can be found in the used predictive algorithm of the artificial intelligence.

While research shows that organic labels are perceived positively for most food products, the findings are more ambiguous for wine. This may be due to the complexity of the product. Accordingly, the labelling effect might be influenced by people's prior knowledge of wines and their attitudes towards organic wines and thus be more pronounced for certain consumer groups. Providing insights into those moderators could help to steer people towards sustainable wine consumption. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the effect of organic labelling on consumers' liking of, and their willingness to pay (WTP) for white wine, and the role of potential moderators.

A wine tasting experiment was conducted using a within-subjects design (n = 214). The mediating role of expected liking and the moderating roles of subjective knowledge and attitude towards organic wine were analysed using the MEMORE macro in SPSS.

The results do not confirm an overall positive halo effect of labelling on liking of organic wine. Nevertheless, a positive halo effect on actual liking was observed for those respondents who have a positive attitude towards organic wine. Furthermore, an overall positive effect of organic labelling on WTP was found. Mediation effects could not be confirmed.

This study used an experimental design that considers not only expected liking but also actual liking and WTP for organic wines. Using a moderation-mediation framework helps to better understand consumers' quality evaluation and WTP for organic wine. Finally, it could be shown that the organic halo is more complex for the product category of wine than others have previously stated.