Assessments in public procurement procedures

Abstract

In this paper we study how to assess the performance of a group of individuals according to their achievements in several attributes or categories by means of a scoring system. Such an assessment is the composition of two steps. First, each individual obtains a partial score in each category (that may potentially depend on her opponents’ performance). And second, those partial scores are combined into a global assessment. The partial score in each attribute is upper bounded by an exogenous threshold or cap. Each problem is determined by four elements: a set of agents (or tenders), a set of attributes to be evaluated, a matrix of achievements that specified the score each agent has obtained in each attribute, and a vector of caps. By means of the axiomatic methodology, we identify the families of assessment functions that satisfy some natural requirements ( anonymity, continuity, monotonicity, null contribution, additivity , and separability ). Our findings state that these families are weighted averages of the attribute assessments. Finally, as an illustration, we analyze a public tender whose purpose was to carry out an accounts auditing of a public company. As a practical implication of our theoretical results, we show that truncation presents significant advantages with respect to other methods. Particularly, it avoids the exclusion paradox.