the litigious plaintiff hypothesis case selection and resolution the process through which cases are selected for litigation cannot be ignored because it yields a set of lawsuits and plaintiffs that is far from a random selection either of potential claims or of potential claimants we present a theoretical framework for understanding the operation of this suit selection process and its relationship to the underlying distribution of potential claims and claimants the model has implications for the trial rate and the plaintiff win rate at trial our empirical analysis using data on over 200 000 federal civil litigations yields results that are strongly consistent with the theory

pretrial bargaining with self serving bias and asymmetric information abstract we introduce self serving bias into the bebchuk rand journal of economics 15 1984 404 model in which trials result from asymmetric information and characterize the equilibrium an increase in the self serving bias of a defendant who receives an offer can under some circumstances reduce the incidence of trial more typically however we find that an increase in the self serving bias of either player increases the incidence of trial an increase in the self serving bias of a player who receives the offer has ambiguous effects on that player s welfare self serving bias serves as a commitment mechanism not to accept offers which are too unfavorable but players with such a bias typically end up in trial more often for the player making the offer we find that an increase in self serving bias unambiguously lowers welfare

short run strategies for attracting foreign direct investment this paper empirically investigates the effectiveness and feasibility of two fdi policies fiscal incentives and deregulation aimed at improving the attractiveness of a country in the short run using disaggregated data on sales by us mnes foreign affiliates in 43 developed and developing countries over the 1982 94 period results show that the provision of fiscal incentives or the deregulation of the labour market would exert a positive impact on total fdi given the drawbacks frequently associated with the use of incentive packages economy wide policies which ease firing procedures and reduce severance payments would certainly be the best policy option this paper also highlights the different aggregation and omitted variable biases that have affected results of previous studies and provides some support to recent theoretical models of fdi by showing that third country effects and spatial interdependence influence respectively the location of export platform fdi and vertical fdi

earnings effects of labor organizations in 1890 analyzing data from extensive surveys of u s nonfarm families in 1889 90 predominantly families from eastern states the authors of this paper show that workers affiliated with labor organizations had earnings that were 22 percent higher than the earnings of other workers an effect comparable in magnitude to estimates for modern unions wage differentials varied considerably across the eight industries studied and across skill levels within each industry

pretrial bargaining with asymmetric information unilateral versus bilateral payoff relevance author affiliation amy farmer amyf walton uark edupaul pecorino ppecorin cba ua edu acknowledgment we would like to thank akram temimi and two anonymous referees for providing helpful comments on the article 1 introductionasymmetric information is a leading explanation for bargaining failure and the role of asymmetric information has been extensively analyzed in the civil litigation literature 1 most of this literature concerns information that has bilateral payoff relevance in the sense that the information in question affects the expected payoff at trial of both the plaintiff and defendant when there is bilateral payoff relevance trials may be predicted in the equilibrium of the bargaining game regardless of whether the informed or uninformed party makes the offer in this article we analyze information that has unilateral payoff relevance meaning that it affects the expected payoff of one of the two parties to the dispute but not the other as an example suppose the plaintiff has private information on her risk preferences this affects her expected payoff at trial but not the defendant s when there is unilateral payoff relevance there are never inefficient trials in the equilibrium of the game where the informed party makes the offer 2 however there may still be costly disputes in the equilibrium of the game in which the uninformed party makes the offer examples of information with bilateral payoff relevance include information on the probability that the plaintiff will prevail at trial and information on the amount of the judgment to be awarded at trial in the event the plaintiff is victorious in both cases the information clearly affects the expected payoff of both the plaintiff and defendant at trial and these are the types of informational asymmetry considered most often in the literature what type of information has only unilateral payoff relevance one example mentioned above is information on risk preferences farmer and pecorino 1994 swanson and mason 1998 and heyes rickman and tzavara 2004 all examine asymmetric information on risk preferences within the context of the screening model in which the uninformed party makes the offer 3 in each case trials are predicted in the equilibrium of these models as long as trials are not too costly for the participants however other types of information also have only unilateral payoff relevance a large literature on the ultimatum game has provided convincing evidence that under certain circumstances individuals will express a preference for being treated fairly 4 this preference may be expressed specifically by the percentage of her own court costs a player is willing to concede to her opponent via his settlement offer 5 since this preference is not observable and presumably differs across individuals the proposer in a screening game must decide how much of the joint surplus of settlement he will attempt to extract without knowledge of how low he can go before triggering a rejection suppose the judgment is 100 000 and the plaintiff s court costs are 30 000 a plaintiff without a taste for fairness will accept an offer of 70 000 rather than proceed to trial a plaintiff with a taste for fairness might as an example accept no less than 90 000 the defendant then must choose between an offer of 90 000 and 70 000 without knowledge of whether the other party has a taste for fairness or not the defendant will make the low offer if he believes it will be accepted with a sufficiently high probability if the plaintiff does indeed have a taste for fairness she will reject the low offer and a trial will result presumably a mechanism along these lines explains the persistence of disputes in ultimatum game experiments another example of information with unilateral payoff relevance is the degree of litigiousness which can be modeled as differences in perceived court costs on the part of the plaintiff eisenberg and farber 1997

taxes and bank capital structure this paper shows that a reduction in tax discrimination between debt and equity funding leads to better capitalized financial institutions the paper exploits exogenous variation in the tax treatment of debt and equity created by the introduction of a tax shield for equity the results demonstrate that a more equal treatment of debt and equity increases bank capital ratios driven by an increase in common equity the change also leads to a significant reduction in risk taking for ex ante low capitalized banks overall the findings suggest that tax shields could be a valuable and innovative policy tool for bank regulators

rewards to academia the remuneration of vice chancellors and principals this paper models the financial remuneration to vice chancellors and principals at uk higher education institutions after describing the alternative theoretical underpinnings for the determination of pay an earnings function is estimated utilizing institutional and personal characteristics the model suggests only a partial linkage of managerial and performance related indicators to remuneration levels this suggests substantial scope for reorientation of rewards towards such indicators rather than relying on an efficiency wage this would appear particularly appropriate given the present and continued disclosure of this information together with the increased focus on performance indicators relating to teaching and research within the uk higher education sector

towards a new trade policy between the usa and middle east countries estimating trade resistance and export potential at the time of the conclusion of free trade areas ftas between the usa and middle east and north african mena countries there is a lack of literature concerning the measurement of the current us export position with regards to these countries and the us export potential in this area from recent developments of gravity models this paper derives an estimable equation which includes various trade resistance variables notably border effects multilateral resistance as well as specific bilateral effects the model is tested in order to scrutinise the impact of these variables on us exports to mena countries as well as the us export potential in this area to that end a selection of panel data specifications is proposed mainly hausman and taylor models as well as arellano and bond dynamic models results unambiguously indicate that as compared to the other oecd countries the usa suffers from a substantial trade integration deficit with mena countries this is reflected by the strongly negative values of the us mena bilateral fixed effects as well as the high bilateral border effects in addition the estimated actual potential us export ratio to these countries is only 0 76 therefore implementing an fta between the usa and mena countries may allow the former to progressively improve its export position in this area this would also help mena countries diversify their supplying sources

expert opinion and cuisine reputation in the market for restaurant meals as food is an experience good the market for restaurant meals is a market where the cost of acquiring information regarding quality is relatively high in such markets consumers often turn to reputation measures to guide purchase decisions as australia does not have a longstanding cuisine style of its own and given australia has been open to substantial immigration inflows since federation it represents an especially appropriate market to study regarding the impact of individual restaurant reputation and collective cuisine reputation on meal prices the following study uses the hedonic price approach to investigate the implicit price of individual reputation indicators cuisine type reputation indicators and other objective indicators in the market for restaurant meals the empirical findings presented suggest that both individual restaurant reputation and cuisine type reputation are important other important factors are shown to include the quality of the restaurant wine list the availability of pr

hedonic price indexes for residential housing a survey evaluation and taxonomy every house is different it is important that house price indexes take account of these quality differences hedonic methods which express house prices as a function of a vector of characteristics such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms land area and location are particularly useful for this purpose i consider here some developments in the hedonic methodology as it is applied in a housing context that have occurred in the last three decades a number of hedonic house price indexes are now available however it is often difficult to see how these indexes relate to each other for this reason i attempt to impose some structure on the literature by developing a taxonomy of hedonic indexes and then show how existing indexes fit into this taxonomy also discussed are some promising areas for future research in the hedonic field in particular greater use needs to be made of spatial econometric and nonparametric methods to exploit the increased availability of geospatial data the main criticisms of the hedonic approach are evaluated and compared with those of the repeat sales and stratified median methods the overall conclusion is that the advantages of the hedonic approach outweigh its disadvantages

do corporations sell houses for less a test of housing market efficiency this paper examines the popular notion that houses sold by corporations as a part of the employee relocation process sell at a discount we argue that such discounts conradict the notion of an efficient market in which indentical houses have the same expected sales price we test for corporate individual owned house price homogeneity using data from a metropolitan area in the us the evidence supports our single price hypothesis corporate houses do not sell for less than they would if sold by individuals

cellular telephone new products and the cpi since their introduction in 1983 cellular telephones adoption has grown at 25 35 per year at year end 1997 about 55 million cellular telephones were in use in the united states the bureau of labor statistics bls did not know that cellular telephones existed at least in terms of calculating the consumer price index cpi until 1998 when they were finally included in the cpi omitting cellular telephones from the cpi created a significant bias i estimate a bias in the bls estimate of the telecommunications services index of between 8 1 9 per year because of the omission of the cellular telephone rather than telecommunications service prices increasing at about 1 1 per year the correct calculation has them decreasing at about 8 per year omission of new goods from the cpi for significant periods of time leads to important bias in the calculation of the cpi

dynamics of asymmetric conflict the case of the german milk conflict the german milk conflict developed when an emerging farmer association challenged the large incumbent in the wake of an insufficiently communicated policy change abolition of the milk quota the organizations represent opposing sides of a common policy debate market liberalization versus regulation the study analyzed the patterns between the two organizations and proposed a grounded theory of asymmetric conflict due to the elevated level of emotions during the conflict the study used a qualitative research approach based on 34 in depth interviews the analysis uncovered the interlocking patterns of simplification and emotionalization by the smaller association and rationalizing by the larger association results indicate how an active opponent can use policy changes to its advantage and how to prevent such a development recommendations based on the grounded theory developed such as implementing suitable communication strategies are transferable to a variety of changes and conflict situations in complex environments such as the food and agricultural sector

labour productivity in the british and south wales coal industry 1874 1914 naked to the waist hot and grimy with labour they squatted on their heels for a few minutes and talked seeing each other dimly by the light of the safety lamps while the black coal rose jutting around them and the props of wood stood like little pillars in the low black very dark temple the day passed pleasantly enough there was an ease a go asyou please about the day underground a delightful camaraderie of men shut off alone from the rest of the world in a dangerous place and a variety of labour holing loading timbering and a glamour of mystery and adventure in the atmosphere d h lawrence 1955 the above quote from d h lawrence while perhaps over emphasizing glamour and adventure illustrates one important aspect of colliery work the intensity of a collier s effort was primarily self imposed it was the work intensity combined with other factors that determined labour productivity in the coal mines a number of articles have addressed the problem of labour productivity in coalmining during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries two of the most important being a j taylor s 1961 examination of productivity and technological change in britain and r h walters 1975 analysis of the same topic for south wales 1 in addition there is a rich and growing literature on the broader problem of the existence of a climacteric a downward shift in the performance of the british economy in the late nineteenth century often attributed to the failure of british entrepreneurs as represented by their seeming unwillingness to adopt the best available techniques of production 2 the purpose of this paper is to specify and estimate an empirical model of labour productivity in coalmining as well as to provide some suggestive evidence regarding the performance of entrepreneurs in this major industry 3 we believe our results provide added insight into the determination of labour productivity during this period lending support to those who argue that the failure of british entrepreneurs has yet to be proved while providing mixed evidence regarding conclusions drawn by economic historians

adaptation to an irrigation water restriction imposed through local governance abstract we estimate how farmers adapted to a water restriction imposed through local governance the restriction imposed a uniform quota on water use with a 5 year allocation and allowed trading of the quota within the restricted area our analysis exploits unique micro level data on irrigated water use irrigated acreage and crops we use a difference in differences econometric strategy that also includes farmer time fixed effects to estimate the response to the restriction where we exploit water rights between 2 and 5 miles of the policy boundary as a control group results indicate that farmers reduced water use by 26 due to the policy with most of the response due to reductions in water use intensity on the same crops rather than through reductions in irrigated acreage or changes in crops the results imply that the short run welfare impact of the policy was smaller than a policy that reduces irrigated acreage

the earnings of canadian immigrant and native born males this paper examines the economic attainment of canadian immigrants although foreign born males initially earn less than the native born their earnings rise more rapidly with canadian labour market experience and after 14years their earnings equal and exceed those of the native population it is also shown that the use of mincer s identity leads to biased results when estimating the earnings of the immigrant population

paying for mitigation a multiple country study a contingent valuation study conducted in china sweden and the united states was used to investigate citizens willingness to pay wtp for reducing co2 emissions we find that a majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over the last 100 years and that humans are responsible for the increase the share of americans that believes these statements is smaller and a relatively larger share of americans also believes that nothing can be done to stop climate change sweden has the highest wtp while china has the lowest jel q51 q54

hedonic imputation and the price index problem an application to housing in this study we show how use of the hedonic imputation method complicates the price index problem in addition to the usual choice between formulas such as fisher and tornqvist the fact that index compilers have some discretion over which prices are imputed implies that it is necessary to choose as well between different varieties of each formula the functional form of the hedonic model must also be taken into account we illustrate the importance of these issues in a housing context using house price data for three regions in sydney over a 3 yr period jel c43 e31 o47 r31

age time vintage and price indexes measuring the depreciation pattern of houses age time and vintage are key determinants of house prices yet they cannot be included together linearly or as dichotomous variables in hedonic regressions as construction time age of house sale time we introduce a method where the estimates of the age time and vintage effects on prices are obtained in a flexible manner without requiring us to specify a pre determined functional form for either of these variables applying our method to dutch data we find that the estimated depreciation pattern over the life of houses does not follow the functional forms typically specified for the age of houses in hedonic regressions

a reconsideration of hedonic price indexes with an application to pc s this paper compares hedonic to matched model indexes matched model indexes are averages of the price changes of goods that remain on sampled stores shelves since goods that disappear tend to have falling market values matched model indexes select from the right tail of price changes the bls can construct hedonic indexes that correct for this selection and are justified by standard arguments in an empirical study of pc s hedonics produce sharp price declines while matched model indexes are near zero also though there are modifications to hedonics that seem desirable they are not those in current use

when quality signals talk evidence from the turin hotel industry abstract this study analyzes the relationship between quality signals and price setting through the application of hedonic price functions the model proposals also include variables relating to land use policies and tourism development strategies a simultaneous equation model endogenously estimates quality signals this method is appropriate for analyzing emerging urban destinations as characterized by the presence of an expanding hotel industry the results are based on a dataset of 145 hotels in turin italy the empirical findings reveal that reputation based quality signals help explain tariff levels price proposals also include a premium for quality assured hotels defining some limits of the current hotel classification system the empirical evidence has significant marketing implications for the hospitality industry s competitiveness since the results clarify the impact of quality signals on price level

the price of residential land for counties zip codes and census tracts in the united states abstract data from millions of appraisals in 2012 2019 are used to estimate residential land prices the share of house value attributable to land and related statistics down to the census tract level for areas that include the vast majority of u s population and single family housing the results confirm predictions about land prices from canonical urban models over 2012 2019 we show that land prices rose faster than house prices in large metro areas boosting the land share of house value while the land share fell in smaller metros the data are available for download at https www fhfa gov papers wp1901 aspx

litigation and settlement under two sided incomplete information this paper deals with a simple game of litigation and settlement with incomplete information parties are assumed to have the choice between settling their dispute out of court or resorting to costly litigation the set of sequential equilibria is characterized and conditions are given under which an efficient equilibrium does exist efficient equilibria however will be ruled out by various tests of refinement a comparative statics analysis is carried out with respect to the quality of private information which parties are assumed to receive before any moves have to be made

scanner data and the treatment of quality change in nonrevisable price indexes the recently developed rolling year geks procedure makes maximum use of all matches in the data to construct nonrevisable price indexes that are approximately free from chain drift a potential weakness is that unmatched items are ignored in this article we use imputation tornqvist price indexes as inputs into the rolling year geks procedure these indexes account for quality changes by imputing the missing prices associated with new and disappearing items three imputation methods are discussed the first method makes explicit imputations using a hedonic regression model which is estimated for each time period the other two methods make implicit imputations they are based on time dummy hedonic and time product dummy regression models and are estimated on bilateral pooled data we present empirical evidence for new zealand from scanner data on eight consumer electronics products and find that accounting for quality change can make a substantial difference

the charity of the extremely wealthy our experience worldwide is that first generation wealth is actually more generous than dynastic wealth both here in india and u s and other countries the biggest givers are those who are receivers of first generation wealth bill gates quoted in thakur lee and frye 2011 i introduction in this article we study the charitable behavior of billionaires focusing on the impact of the source of their wealth on their charitable donations and pledges while billionaires play a leading role in both the economy and in philanthropy and they are watched closely by journalists and the public at large econometric studies that focus on the behavior of billionaires are rare 1 understanding the charitable behavior of the extremely wealthy is important because they are responsible for a disproportional share of overall giving directly through the amounts of money they give and also because their public status makes their behavior an example for others to follow while the determinants of individual giving have already been studied in experimental settings and using surveys reinstein and riener 2012 steinberg et al 2011 this article documents charitable behavior of a larger magnitude than that typically studied in experiments and of people who do not participate in experiments or fill out surveys 2 our analysis focuses on the question of whether self made billionaires are more charitable than billionaires who inherited their money as bill gates suggested in the quote above it is well documented that people s decisions on how to spend money often depend on how they received that money epley mak and chen idson 2006 for example show that the propensity to consume is bigger if income received is framed as a bonus rather than a rebate arkes et al 1994 show that windfall gains are more readily consumed than nonwindfall gains such evidence has been found both inside and outside the laboratory but in this article we investigate whether treatment of income varies depending on its source when the amounts at stake are much larger than previously studied in the literature in this article amounts range from millions to billions of dollars in comparison with the tens or hundreds of dollars in experimental literature or the tens of thousands of dollars studied in the research on decisions in every day life moreover studies that investigate how spending varies with the source of money typically conclude that earned income is spent more carefully than windfall gains however in the case of charitable giving self made money seems to be more rather than less likely to be spent on charity than inherited money steinberg et al 2011 indeed show using data from the charitable giving module of the panel study of income dynamics psid that the presence of inherited wealth increases giving but also that income held constant an increase in the proportion of income coming from an inheritance is associated with a decrease in charitable giving 3 to study the charitable behavior of the extremely wealthy we use data from the giving pledge a global public pledge to give away at least half of one s fortune during one s lifetime http givingpledge org which by now has been signed by more than 100 extremely wealthy people typically current billionaires in addition we use data on the presence of u s billionaires in the philanthropy top 50 and in the million dollar list a list of those who have given grants of 1 million or more since 2000 we find evidence that self made billionaires are three to four times more likely to sign the giving pledge and to enter the philanthropy top 50 list of biggest pledges compared with those who inherited their wealth at the same time we find that the gap in probabilities between self made and inherited wealth is much smaller at about 28 when looking at the presence in the million dollar list we also find that self made billionaires give more on average than inherited billionaires do when measuring total gifts using the million dollar list or the philanthropy top 50

room in the kitchen for the melting pot immigration and rental prices this paper studies the response of housing markets to immigration shocks following card 1990 i examine the changes in rental prices in miami and three comparison groups after the mariel boatlift this exogenous immigration shock added an extra 9 to miami s renter population in 1980 i find that rents increased from 8 to 11 more in miami than in the comparison groups between 1979 and 1981 by 1983 the rent differential was still 7 rental units of higher quality were not affected by the immigration shock units occupied by low income hispanic residents in 1979 experienced an extra 8 differential hike with respect to other low income units relative housing prices moved in the opposite direction from rents in the short run

food chain evaluator a tool for analyzing the impacts and designing scenarios for the institutional catering in lombardy italy abstract a method was developed and applied to evaluate the impacts of food production for improving institutional catering in lombardy northern italy and to outline possible improved scenarios the research takes into account different crop managements i e organic agriculture and adoption of local products and different dietary choices able to guaranty the same nutritional contents the non renewable energy consumed for the production of foods managed by the institutional catering system is proposed as indicator to compare different policies together with other indicators as productive land and productive cost a case of study is presented to test the overall method the outcomes of the work could support a reorientation of both the production and consumption systems in general the shift towards local and organic products implies a reduction of the impacts evaluated further the important impacts of beef consumption in particular in terms of energy and land consumption are demonstrated the work permits an interesting insight about institutional catering taking into account not only the single food chains but also the composition of the meals by different food products an improvement of the tool is in progress in order to properly evaluate the stages of cooking refrigeration packaging energy consumption in catering areas and food waste management a sensitivity analysis will be carried out for assessing the reliability of the results finally other complex environmental indicators such as carbon footprint or ecological footprint could represent other future interesting developments of the tool

effectiveness of rca institutions to limit local externalities using foreclosure data to test covenant effectiveness residential community associations rcas are said to be an efficient institutional agreement to limit local spillovers while several studies have identified a positive marginal effect of rca rules none have explicitly measured the effectiveness of these institutions to limit local externalities this study measures this effectiveness by estimating how the direct and spillover price impacts caused by foreclosure differ by rca status using a spatial hedonic model that controls for selection bias using propensity score methods and coarsened exact matching we find that foreclosed rca properties experience smaller direct foreclosure discounts and produce smaller spill over effects than their non rca counterparts

look who s talking the impacts of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones on agricultural prices abstract using data from the philippines we study the impact of mobile phones on the prices agricultural producers receive for their cash crop we first look at the impact on price of mobile phone ownership at the household level because this masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity we then look at the impact on price of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones we find that whether the household owns a mobile phone has no impact on price but whether a farmer or spouse owns a mobile phone is associated with a 5 to 8 per cent increase in price

unions industrial concentration and wages a re examination market structure or industrial concentration has long been recognized as an important influence on industrial output employment and profits it has also been recognized that some proportion of the profits from concentration may be diverted into wages through collective bargaining yet the precise nature of these relationships has received little attention although it has important implications for the evaluation of wage structure and the welfare loss arising from monopoly empirical studies of the impact of unions and industrial concentration on wages weiss 1966 jones and laudadio 1975 dalton and ford 1977 long and link 1983 follow a similar format after a brief verbal justification for the ability of unions to win higher wage increases when the employer is earning oligopoly profits these studies specify a wage equation of the general form

payment source and the cost of hospital care evidence from a multiproduct cost function with multiple payers abstract this study investigates the capacity of hospitals to vary the intensity of their services based on patients expected sources of payment while the concept of price discrimination by hospitals based on payer generosity cost shifting has been discussed extensively the notion that hospitals can adjust payer specific marginal costs to reflect differences in reimbursement policies has not been studied in depth to examine this issue this analysis employs a multiproduct cost function with hospital outputs defined as admissions by payment source controlling for the distribution and severity of illness casemix for each payer marginal costs of casemix adjusted discharges are obtained and compared for medicare medicaid private payers and a residual category that includes uncompensated care we find that indeed payer specific marginal costs generally reflect payer generosity

the effect of ama membership on physicians earnings this study explores earnings differences between physicians who are members of the american medical association and physicians who are not ama members nonmembers earn on average about 22 percent less per hour of medical practice than members an estimate of the earnings effect of ama membership incorporating the simultaneous determination of earnings and membership suggests however that membership per se increases physicians hourly practice earnings only by about 2 7 percent

credible pretrial negotiation pretrial negotiation is a structured environment in which to study bargaining with incomplete information when a plaintiff believes that a defendant owes him damages he may first attempt to reach a private settlement before resorting to a costly court imposed judgment a central issue in their negotiations is whether the plaintiff s threat to litigate is credible it is possible for the plaintiff to undermine the credibility of his litigation threat by making a settlement demand that is insufficient as a result the plaintiff must raise his settlement demand to limit the amount of bad news he can learn if his offer is rejected when this credibility constraint is binding traditional comparative static results are reversed in addition even though the defendant is being sued he wants the plaintiff s threat to be credible

competitive dialogue procedure for sustainable public procurement the construction sector has adopted green public procurement to improve its environmental performance green public procurement is a process whereby contracting authorities aim to procure services and products that meet environmental requirements in recent years green public procurement has extended to sustainable public procurement which involves the incorporation of both environmental and social considerations in the procurement of goods and services previous studies have suggested the relevance of contractor engagement strategies and the need for appropriate models to promote dialogue in sustainable public procurement this paper illustrates one such model called the competitive dialogue procedure this newly introduced procurement procedure allows the contracting authority to hold discussions with shortlisted contractors regarding the authority s requirements the paper uses the practical case of the kvarnholmen link project in sweden the kvarnholmen link is an infrastructure project that includes the construction of a bridge tunnel underpass and pedestrian and bike path action research was conducted to examine the competitive dialogue procedure this paper has strengthened the conceptualisation that the procedure can facilitate sustainable public procurement with the aid of its key elements such as provisionally preferred solution and dialogue sessions in addition the paper analyses the consequences of the weight used for environmental considerations in the bid evaluation process this paper recommends that contracting authorities implementing competitive dialogue procedure must use provisionally preferred solution to identify sustainable public procurement preferences dialogue sessions with contractors should involve discussions regarding sustainable public procurement to ensure consistency between the weight for environmental considerations and respective preferences

carbon footprint in green public procurement policy evaluation from a case study in the food sector abstract several projects across europe are focused on improving sustainability of public procurements however few of them are measuring the environmental savings achieved by specific policies through the application of environmental impact assessment indicators in this paper we calculate environmental savings by applying a carbon footprint analysis to three food policies implemented by the city of turin italy in the school catering service school years 2012 13 and 2013 14 the policies are focused on i the production of food with the requirement of integrated or organic products ii the geographical origin of the food with the requirement of regional food provisioning and iii the improvement of urban distribution with the requirement of shifting to natural gas vehicles the climate change potential of five of the most consumed foods were studied according to three main phases of the supply chain production including all processes in a cradle to gate perspective provisioning focusing on the transportation from production sites to the peripheral food hubs of the city and distribution focusing on the transportation from the city hubs to schools the results of this study highlight the different climate impacts of the three phases of the supply chain in particular 61 70 of the greenhouse gases are emitted in the production phase 6 11 in the provisioning phase and 24 28 in urban distribution as a consequence policies that affect production practices have the greatest potential for reducing the carbon footprint of the catering service other policies such as those on transportation can have controversial effects therefore to improve planning of sustainability policies the greenhouse gas emission savings achieved by each policy must be analysed in depth