This paper addresses the issue of favoritism at the design stage of a complex procurement auction. A community of citizens wants to procure a project and lacks the knowledge and the ability to translate its preferences into operational technical specifications. This task is delegated to a public officer who may collude with one of the firms at the design stage of the procurement auction in exchange of a bribe. We investigate two simple accountability mechanisms: a random challenge mechanism (RCA) and an alert-based mechanism (ABA), that require justifying one aspect of the technical decision drawn randomly (RCA) or determined by the competitors (ABA). Relying on competitors enables the community to deter favoritism significantly more easily than by relying only on random challenges and the level of penalty needed to fully deter corruption is independent of the complexity of the project and depends on the degree of differentiation within the industry. In an illustrative example, we study the patterns of favoritism when corruption occurs under ABA and compare them with the patterns in the random challenge mechanism.

中文翻译：

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问责制遏制采购招标中的腐败

本文在复杂的采购拍卖的设计阶段解决了偏爱问题。公民社区想要采购项目，但缺乏知识和能力，无法将其偏好转换为运营技术规范。这项任务委托给一名公职人员，他可以在采购拍卖的设计阶段与其中一家公司合谋以换取贿赂。我们研究了两种简单的问责机制：随机质询机制（RCA）和基于警报的机制（ABA），它们要求证明随机制定（RCA）或由竞争者确定（ABA）的技术决策的一个方面是合理的。与仅依靠随机挑战相比，依靠竞争者可以使社区更轻松地遏制偏爱，而完全遏制腐败所需的罚款水平与项目的复杂性无关，并且取决于行业内的差异程度。在一个说明性示例中，我们研究了ABA下腐败发生时的偏爱模式，并将它们与随机挑战机制中的模式进行比较。