Although most public procurements involve decisions concerning bundling, only a limited body of empirical research guides policy on this matter. In this paper, we examine the cost effects of bundling in the competitive tendering of highway pavement replacement with hot-mix asphalt. For this we use linear regression on data from a comprehensive sample of such contracts procured by the Swedish infrastructure manager (IM) during the 2012–2015 period. We find that bundling affects the procurer's cost in multiple and partly counteracting ways. Our results show that economies of scale are strong but diminishing and counteracted by the costs of bundling and bundling-related factors. Overall, the findings support the Swedish IM's current bundle design but also suggest that most of the contracts are still inefficiently small. While not perfectly generalizable to other markets, the findings provide some support for the increased promotion and use of the bundling of small-scale road rehabilitation projects in the USA. Two main implications of the results are that bundling policy should emphasize proximity and similarity rather than whether the work is small in scale and that the scope for efficient bundling should be accounted for when optimizing the timing of pavement replacement.

The problem of slow productivity growth in the road construction (and wider construction) industry is well known. The present paper suggests a means for efficiency analysis in one part of this industry, namely road surface renewal in Sweden, built upon the application of Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) techniques. The paper is novel in that it focuses on project level rather than firm or contractor level performance and takes the perspective of the inefficiency that may result from the way the contracts are specified by the highway agency’s pavement engineers (client side). We compare 233 renewal contracts tendered over a four-year period via the estimation of a cost frontier, with controls for heterogeneity between projects. Our results produce first estimates that expose substantive differences in the relative efficiency performance of different engineers within the Swedish highways procurement organisation (Trafikverket); with indicative savings of around €40 m out of a total road renewals budget in Sweden of €200 m. We also find substantial economies of scale that could, in principle, point to further cost savings if road renewal projects can be packaged up as larger projects. These client-side savings represent potentially important sources of savings in addition to those that can be achieved through the pressure of competitive tendering on the supplier side. The paper therefore illustrates how disaggregate analysis of project level information can readily be used for revealing important information about how best to frame the procurement process and thus deliver productivity and unit cost improvements over time. © 2023, The Author(s).

The standard public procurement approach has been to award contracts to the lowest bidder meeting the requirements. In the EU, another award mechanism is almost as common and, moreover, is being promoted, i.e. awarding contracts to the best combination of price and quality, though whether this provides better value has rarely been studied. We contribute relevant empirical evidence by analyzing performance in public bus service contracts. In awarding contracts, a Swedish regional public transport authority alternated between favoring the lowest price and evaluating both price and bus operators’ processes for managing and improving bus service. The results of comparing these two approaches suggest that bus operators perform equally well in terms of punctuality regardless of the award mechanism. We conclude that caution is needed when promoting and implementing award mechanisms evaluating both price and quality. Knowledge of whether and how these outperform lowest price mechanisms remain limited in practice.

Awarding public contracts to the best combination of price and quality has become a standard and promoted policy in the EU. Still, there is little evidence on how well public agencies implement this policy, here termed scoring rules. This study reviews how Sweden’s public transport authorities (PTAs) implemented scoring rules, using a sample of 560 contracts for public bus services. The review shows large differences in whether and how different PTAs implemented scoring rules. Several PTAs used non-monetary scales for their scoring rules and many quality criteria, linked to the suppliers’ plans and internal processes. This variant is found to present issues regarding transaction costs, as well as heightened risk of moral hazard and adverse selection. The paper concludes that public procurers need better guidance on when and how to use scoring rules for achieving a good price-quality trade-off.