Eureka!

Eureka! 

After 4 or 5 months of struggles to find a proper topic in which to devote the next 4 years I have managed to come up with what it seems to be an original and legally pertinent idea. Whoot! 

The first steps of my Norwegian PhD experience involved plenty of reading (more books than what I read for my LLM in 2 years!) and trying to find a good subject to write a dissertation. At first, the idea was to explore the relation between public procurement and State aid. The more I read about it the more I realized that either it was already very much explored or there was not enough substance for me to dig in. At least this was my outcome after trying hard to find a "niche". While reading my interest in public procurement and its interaction with an old interest of mine, competition law in pure and simple terms started to rise.

For the past month I have been exploring the interaction between public procurement and competition law. In other words, my research has been and will be focused on how the public procurement structure might lead to practices that can be considered as contrary to the competition law regime. The central idea is that public procurement tries to serve as a mechanism for the acquisition of goods, services and works for the State while minimizing corruption and increasing value for money; however, the public procurement structures may lead to distortion in the market not because of the rules itself, but rather because of the conducts that the procuring entity and the private players may adopt to win the award of a public contract. The research question is then: are unfair competition practices promoted by public procurement? If so, which types of conducts are observed and what changes are required to obtain a better outcome of both regimes?

Currently, two different aspects of the problem are being analyzed. The idea is to choose one of these sides of the coin. I have managed to differentiate concerns that are related to either public law or to private.

In the public law sphere the main issues are:

• Transparency as a facilitator of collusive behaviour.
• Tender modalities and their outcomes.
• Different forms of competition. Emphasis on price competition.
• Exclusion from tenders due to competition law laiabilities.
• Buyer power of procuring entities.
• Procuring entities as detectors of unfair practices.

(Btw, the Pope has just resigned to his post, back to public procurement now).

• Incumbency.

In the private law sphere the aspects of interest are:

• Incumbency, from a tenderer's perspective.
• Collusive practices.
• Foreclosure.
• Joint tendering.

Anyone has any comments on the project? All suggestions and ideas are more than welcome!