Will procurement officials be biased to disregard procurement rules in favor of a low-priced, albeit defective, bid?

Resource type
Authors/contributors
Title
Will procurement officials be biased to disregard procurement rules in favor of a low-priced, albeit defective, bid?
Abstract
Summary. 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.
Publication
Review of Law & Economics
Volume
14
Issue
2
Date
2018-08-28
DOI
10.1515/rle-2016-0014
ISSN
1555-5879
Accessed
9/14/20, 4:29 AM
Library Catalog
DOI.org (Crossref)
Citation
Dekel, O., & Dotan, Y. (2018). Will procurement officials be biased to disregard procurement rules in favor of a low-priced, albeit defective, bid? Review of Law & Economics, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.1515/rle-2016-0014