Will Procurement Officials be Biased to Disregard Procurement Rules in Favor of a Low-priced, Albeit Defective, Bid?

Omer Dekel*, Yoav Dotan

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

To what extent are professional decision-makers in the field of public procurement susceptible to cognitive biases? Recent research found a bias in favor of the lower bidder when ranking competing bids (Dekel and Schurr 2014, "Cognitive Biases in Government Procurement - an Experimental Study with Real Bid Evaluators," 10(2) Review of Law and Economics 169-200). In the present research we examine this question regarding another stage of the public procurement process - the qualification stage. To this end, we conducted a series of experiments with the participation of procurement officials in situations that closely resemble their daily work. Our main finding is that even though procurement officials are susceptible to a cognitive bias when they have to score competing bids, they overcome that bias when asked to decide whether to qualify faulty or questionable bids. We cautiously ascribe this difference to the different types of decision-making involved, and suggest further explorations of these insights.

Original languageEnglish
JournalReview of Law and Economics
Volume14
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.

Keywords

  • behavioral economics
  • cognitive bias
  • competitive bidding
  • lower bid bias
  • public procurement

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