2 results
11 - Competitive procurement of reintegration services in the Netherlands
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- By Maurice Dykstra, Senior researcher, SEOR; Fellow, Erasmus Competition and Regulation Institute, Jaap de Koning, Director, SEOR
- Edited by Maarten Janssen, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
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- Book:
- Auctioning Public Assets
- Published online:
- 03 December 2009
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2004, pp 273-295
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Recently, the delivery of reintegration services to the unemployed and the disabled in the Netherlands – formerly a public task – has largely been privatised. The government still funds these services, but implementation is left to private agencies that have to compete for the contracts. Considerable improvements in these services in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency are expected from the privatisation. The purpose of this chapter is to give a description and an evaluation of the initial period following the introduction of the new system. Before we do that, we first discuss a number of points that may not be familiar to readers who are not specialists in labour market issues. Thus, why does the government provide or at least subsidise reintegration services? What do we understand by reintegration services?
Reintegration services are a particular form of employment service. The general aim of employment services is to help unemployed people find a job and employers fill their vacancies. There are several reasons why jobseekers and vacancies do not instantly match. An obvious reason is that both jobseekers and firms have imperfect information. However, we can also observe that some unemployed or disabled people have more fundamental problems in finding a job. They may lack a good strategy in searching for work or a network to help find them a job, or their skills may be insufficient.
In most European countries the provision of employment services is largely a public task.
2 - Beauty Contest design
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- By Maurice Dykstra, Senior Researcher, SEOR, Nico van der Windt, Director, SEOR
- Edited by Maarten Janssen, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
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- Book:
- Auctioning Public Assets
- Published online:
- 03 December 2009
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2004, pp 64-79
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
Beauty Contests are very common in the procurement of goods and services in the public and private sectors. The public sector has also frequently used Beauty Contests for allocating rights to the private sector to produce goods and services, such as the right to exploit radio frequencies for several purposes or the right to exploit railways or other networks. Although the basic principles of Beauty Contests in both applications are the same, the discussion in this chapter focuses on Beauty Contests as an allocation mechanism.
A Beauty Contest is just one mechanism in a range of allocation modalities, such as lotteries, first-come-first-served allocations, Beauty Contests, auctions, etc. It can be argued that among these modalities Beauty Contests are best suited for projects where there is scope for innovation and different approaches by developers and where authorities hope to elicit imaginative proposals for projects. According to this argument, Beauty Contests permit developers to be creative and to tailor projects to the particular needs of the government since the terms are mostly not fully fixed beforehand. For example, procurement of research projects is for this reason virtually always decided by means of a Beauty Contest.
Despite Beauty Contests' widespread use in procurement and allocation, the economic literature on their design is (almost) non-existent. This chapter is therefore based on practical experience, rather than on existing literature.
The main objective of this chapter is to explain the place of Beauty Contests in the context of allocation mechanisms.