Contract renewal in urban water services, incumbent advantage, and market concentration Albalate, Daniel Bel, Germà González Gómez, Francisco José Picazo-Tadeo, Andrès J. Competition Contract renewal Market concentration Private urban water industry Spain Transparency Contract renewal with the incumbent is common practice in the contracting-out of public services. It could, however, affect competition by reinforcing trends towards market concentration. This article contributes empirical evidence on the determinants of the result of public tenders for the renewal of private provision of the urban water service. A dataset with information on 215 public tenders held in Spain between 2008 and 2019 is employed. The methodology is grounded in logistic regression techniques. The findings indicate that incum- bents’ size does not play a role in the probability of alternating between service providers. Fur- thermore, competitionproxied by the number of biddersand transparency in managing public tenders both increase the likelihood of alternating between providers. Lastly, the estimates sug- gest that larger municipality size and discretionary power of entrenched political parties might also play a role in favoring incumbents’ contract renewal. 2023-11-28T07:46:48Z 2023-11-28T07:46:48Z 2022-03 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Albalate, D., Bel, G., González‐Gómez, F., & Picazo‐Tadeo, A. J. (2022). Contract renewal in urban water services, incumbent advantage, and market concentration. Public Administration Review, 82(2), 314-324. https://hdl.handle.net/10481/85881 10.1111/puar.13282 eng ECO2016-75237-R ECO2017-86822-R PID2019-104319RB-I00 PROMETEO 2018-102 SGR2017-644 P18-RT-576 B-SEJ-018-UGR18 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License Wiley