This paper empirically investigates the effect of the competitive environment (number of participants) on the cost of procurement. We use a unique dataset provided by the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) of Turkey that covers all of the government procurement auctions for the years...

We present an easy-to-implement method to identify the optimal number of bidders in public procurement auctions. We examine a unique data set that covers all government procurement auctions comprising more than half a million observations. We show that there is an optimal number of bidders at...