Does more competition actually lower the price in public tenders?

Question

Accepted Answer

In the Portuguese register it moves with it, and the size is measurable. Comparing each open procedure's contracted price against the buyer's own published base price, the median discount rises at every step: 1 0.6%, 2 3.7%, 3 8.6%, 4 9.9%, 5 12.5%, 6 to 10 18.4%, more than 10 30.2%, counted on 6,183 procedures in janeiro a julho de 2026. A procedure that draws a single bid closes about 0.6% below the ceiling; one that draws more than ten closes about 30.2% below it. Two things have to travel with that. It is an association and not a cause: whoever attracts ten bids is usually buying something more standardised than whoever attracts one. And procedures split into lots are excluded, all 12,968 of them, because the ceiling belongs to the whole procedure while the price belongs to one contract, and dividing the two makes lotting look like price pressure. Keeping them in would have produced a far more flattering curve and a false one.