A Study of Bid-rigging in Procurement Auctions: Evidence from Indonesia, Georgia, Mongolia, Malta, and State of California

We apply a Regression Discontinuity based approach to screen for collusion developed in Kawai et al. (2022) to public procurement data from five countries. We find that bidders who win by a very small margin have significantly lower backlog than those who lose by a very small margin in the sample of procurement auctions from Indonesia, suggesting that bidders collude by bid rotation. Our results suggest that the proportion of noncompetitive auctions is at least about 5% for all E-procurement auctions and about 3% for all auctions in Indonesia. We cannot reject the null of competition in other countries.