The Aspects of Collaborative Procurement: Centralization, Scope and Different Market Structures

Procurement centralization is a process that includes policy decisions on the appropriate level of collaboration, aggregation and standardization. We analyse the main aspects of collaborative procurement: centralization, scope and different market structures. We use a unique dataset that combines Czech tender-level data with the manually-collected data on centrally procured tenders and financial firm-level data for the time span 2008 - 2016. We apply vector generalized linear model to the compulsory centralized procurement sectors and assess the market competition and concentration. We find several key aspects of centralized procurement: the centralization has a significant positive impact on the competition in selected sectors. The framework agreement is recognized as a positive setup of public procurement. We identified a strong negative evidence of the heterogeneity of the procured commodity. The design of centralization process and the degree of centralization is always bound by two elementary questions: the flexibility or unification trade-off and the set-up costs or unit costs trade-off. JEL Classification D44, H11, H57 Keywords public procurement, centralization, tender- level data, firm-level data, market structure, concentration index, vector generalized linear model, Herfindahl-Hirschman..