Learning to Contract in Public Procurement: An Empirical Exploration of the Role of Organizational Design in the Public Procurement Process

This is the second in the department’s series of research seminars. The plan is to have a seminar right after each department information meeting (first Tuesday of every month).

Abstract

How do organizations learn to contract in public procurement? Previous research on learning to contract highlights the importance of contracting capabilities for successfully managing buyer-supplier relationships. According to this research, the design of supplier contracts should be aligned with the attributes of the transaction, which require specialized knowledge that is typically dispersed across different internal units and categories of employees. This gives rise to an organizational design problem of how to facilitate specialization, coordination, and integration across different parts of the procuring organization. Based on two case-studies, we examine the nature of learning processes in public procurement and how organizational design impact contractual learning. Our results show that public procurement contracts change as a result of experiential learning and that the nature of this learning is affected by organizational design. More specifically, we find that the aggregation of economic, technical and legal tasks in specific functional units can strengthen contractual learning through specialization and the standardization of processes, and that the level of structural integration between these units may affect what type of learning that occur. 

Keywords: Contracting Capabilities; Learning to Contract; Public procurement; Transaction cost economics
 

Upcoming research seminars

5th November
Against Machines: Why Social Sciences need Singularities and Wild Thinking with Peter Svensson

3rd December
Remaking money for a just and sustainable future with Ester Barinaga

A research seminar could be about anything research-related, on which you want to have feedback or provide food for thought, and where the audience is not necessarily only your own sub discipline. If you have an idea, please contact jens [dot] rennstam [at] fek [dot] lu [dot] se (Jens Rennstam).