پروژه های مشارکت عمومی و خصوصی : به سوی یک مدل از تصمیم گیری مناقصه پیمانکار

Public–private partnership (PPP) projects (PPPs) are central to the UK Government's procurement of public services. PPPs are competitively tendered but a significant minority of projects attract insufficient bidders, making it difficult to demonstrate transparency and value for money. Based on an empirical study, this paper posits an initial model of how private sector bidders decide whether to bid for contracts; a distinction is drawn between two separate assessments made by potential bidders, the risk of bidding and the risk of the project. The paper concludes that the former assessment is insufficiently understood by practitioners and scholars. A research agenda is suggested.

Public–private partnership (PPP) projects (‘PPPs’) form a significant part of the UK Government's strategy for improving the quality and increasing the volume of public services. All PPPs must go through a competitive tendering process to demonstrate value-for-money and transparency of process; thus, the successful delivery of any PPP project is, in the first instance, contingent on the public sector receiving enough acceptable bids. However, some projects attract too fewer bidders initially, or bidders drop out leaving only one. This leaves the public sector in a poor negotiating position. A substantial literature exists on the nature of contractual relationships between the public and private sectors. However, the study of the institutional factors that influence the number and quality of bidders has attracted little attention from management scholars. This paper begins with a brief overview of PPP in the UK. It then reviews relevant practitioner and academic literature. It reports on the methodology and main conclusions of the study. Drawing on the empirical evidence and the literature, it proposes an initial model of how the private sector decides whether to bid for PPP contracts. It concludes that further development of this type of model would help address the lack of competition for some PPP contracts; a research agenda is suggested.

This study suggests that the use of PPP is being hampered by the public sector's lack of understanding of how potential private sector bidders view contracts. Both the literature and the empirical evidence suggests that bidders concern themselves with two risk assessments, the risk of participating in the bidding process and the risk of the project itself. However, the literature is under developed in relation both to the bidding process and to contracts not awarded simply on price. Unless the public sector has a clearer understanding of bidder decision-making, it risks failing to address the problem of low bidder response. Individual initiatives (such as procedural standardisation) may bring benefits but may not address competition problems. This research has been exploratory but its conclusions suggest that there is a rich research agenda that could contribute both to improving PPP procurement and to the development of the literature on public contracting.