Analyzes the impact of bid evaluation methods on bus service quality in Sweden, suggesting unclear benefits of the preferred approach.
Theoretical work on auctions has shown conceptual benefits of awarding contracts to the bidder offering the best combination of price and quality, rather than the lowest bidder. Correspondingly, EU policy on public procurement promotes such multi-criteria bid evaluation, which is already common in Europe. However, very few empirical studies have examined the effects of this policy. This study analyses panel data on monitored quality in Swedish public bus service contracts awarded using either mechanism. We do not find that the studied implementations of award mechanisms perform differently and conclude that the superiority of the currently promoted mechanism remains uncertain.
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Ridderstedt et al. (2024) studied this question.
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