Autor(es):
Sturm, Niclas Frederic ; Candia, Cristian ; Damásio, Bruno ; Pinheiro, Flávio L.
Data: 2025
Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/182045
Origem: Repositório Institucional da UNL
Projeto/bolsa:
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/FCT/6817 - DCRRNI ID/UIDB%2F04152%2F2020/PT;
Assunto(s): Public Procurement; Tenders; Market Organization; Network Analysis; Competition; Complexity; Modelling and Simulation; Computer Science Applications; Computational Mathematics; SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth
Descrição
Sturm, N. F., Candia, C., Damásio, B., & Pinheiro, F. L. (2025). High earnings through firm influence: the role of hierarchical structures in public procurement. EPJ Data Science, 14, 1-20. Article 27. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00543-z --- The authors are thankful to Dominik Hartmann for his feedback and comments. BD and FLP acknowledge the financial support provided by FCT Portugal under the project UIDB/04152/2020 – Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC)
Public procurement, a critical but often overlooked aspect of governance, plays a pivotal role in steering the acquisition of goods, services and the commissioning of public works. Our study, analyzing over one million public procurement contracts from the Portuguese public administration, applies network science to unravel the complexities of this market. We uncover a market characterized by highly modular and hierarchical networks, with notable service specialization, regional diversity, and entity diversification. Our findings reveal a clear pattern: firms occupying influential positions within the networks consistently achieve higher earnings per bid. This disparity in earnings indicates a market where competition is constrained and entry barriers for new firms are high. Similarly, markets in the Portuguese public procurement system exhibit high levels of concentration, which raises both integrity and supplier risks that should be monitored by policymakers. The empirical framework developed in this article contributes to a growing body of literature that analyzes the levels of competition in public procurement systems. The network-based method applied here facilitates the analysis of firms’ positioning within their network of competitors and helps to quantify firm capabilities in a way that moves beyond a monolithic view of firm size and market power.
