Competition in government contracting; impact of a fee on the orders-to-trades ratio; output of NCLT in the pandemic

In the field of government contracting, there is a concern about the loss of competition when many private firms choose to avoid government as a customer. In an article How competitive is bidding in infrastructure public procurement? A study of road and water projects in five Indian states today on The Leap Blog, Charmi Mehta and Diya Uday measure competition in a dataset of tenders in five states and two sectors.

The algorithmic trader imposes load upon the exchange IT system when an order is placed, and pays for her consumption of IT resources only when a trade takes place. One method to reshape incentives is a fee based on the orders-to-trades ratio. A new paper analyses the impact of this fee structure: When is the Order to Trade Ratio fee effective? by Nidhi Aggarwal, Venkatesh Panchapagesan, Susan Thomas. Journal of Financial Markets (forthcoming).

A court is a services organisation, and like all services organisations there was a push to shift from physical to electronic operation in the pandemic. A new article measures the output and productivity of one court in India — NCLT — when it graduated to computerised operations. How did courts respond to the pandemic lockdowns: evidence from the NCLT by Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, The Leap Blog, 27 March 2022.