numberOfBids (Submitted or valid)

[practicalparticipation]

From Mihaly Fazekas:

1.5) Number of bids and number of bidders: do these two fields refer to submitted bids or valid bids. Often bids and bidders are excluded by the issuing authorities for administrative and other reasons (high corruption risk is when many bidders are excluded due to minor issues such as missing page numbers!). I suggest including both as they tell a lot about the tendering process both from efficiency and corruption perspectives.

Would this require four fields overall?

numberOfBids
numberOfValidBids
numberOfBidders
numberOfValidBidders

Or is there some better way to model this?

See also #78

[jpmckinney]

I imagine that systems that distinguish valid from invalid bids do so at a per-bid level, so it would make more sense to model Bids and add a valid boolean to that new class (or a new status enum with "accepted", "rejected" as values, or a "rejectionReason" property, etc.) OCDS, though, models bidders, but not bids.

[practicalparticipation]

@jpmckinney Good point. I agree that capturing this in bids makes good sense: I'll add this to #78.

This leaves the question of the semantics of numberOfBids for those who have this number, but not individual detailed bid data. Do we leave it up to the publisher to decide whether this includes only valid bids, or both valid and invalid, or do we need to specify an approach here?

[jpmckinney]

I think there should be a clear definition and not leave it open to inconsistent interpretations.

I would prefer the definition be "all bids" whether valid or invalid. If, on the other hand, a majority of suppliers publishing a total number of bids limit that number to valid bids, then it should be defined as "valid bids". My instinct is that suppliers publish the number of bids (e.g. before even opening them), and only later invalidate bids - and probably don't go back to revise that number.

[birdsarah]

I don't think we have sufficient information to finalize this before RC1, removing numberOfBids and numberOfBidders and moving to After 1.0 milestone

[jpmckinney]

"Number of firms tendering" appears in CoST, which suggests that it's a sufficiently well-supported use case. Why remove numberOfBidders as currently implemented? I think the issue was more around numberOfBids.

[birdsarah]

It seemed to me that there was a set of issues around number of bids and the bidders array and documenting bidding in general, that require discussion and thought on how to put them in. Leaving numberOfBidders in somewhat pre-empts and directs that solution and given that it's all on its lonesome it seemed better to leave it out and let that all be handled in one extension & proposal.

[jpmckinney]

Proposal. A complex count:

{
  "bidderCount": [
    {
      "type": "Eligible bidders",
      "value": 10
    },
    {
      "type": "Ineligible bidders",
      "value": 2
    }
  ]
}

For Myroslav's complex use case, there may be counts for bidders who applied, bidders who were accepted, bidders who submitted a bid after acceptance, bidders who participated in the auction...

A simple count:

{
  "bidderCount": [
    {
      "type": "All bidders",
      "value": 12
    }
  ]
}

There would be a code list for bidder type, not finalized here.

This requires a new table in the flat version. To avoid that, for the simplest case, we can have a:

{
  "numberOfBidders": 12
}

Another question is the choice of the term "bidders"; in Myroslav's example in #78, potential suppliers need to complete a step before becoming participants in a tender, at which point they submit a bid and become "bidders". Perhaps this is the reason for CoST's "number of firms tendering" terminology. We use the terms "supplier" and "entity" elsewhere. Maybe numberOfApplicants or numberOfRespondents?

I don't think we want to do number of bids as there is a lot of variability (e.g. Myroslav's application-bid-auction process points to "bids" not being consistently the same across jurisdictions).

[myroslav]

In fact we do not register participant until they submit value of a bid. documents are not mandatory and can be submitted later.

[jpmckinney]

Thanks for the clarification, @myroslav . What do you think of the term "bidder"? Does it mean something different than an "applicant" or "respondent" to the call for tender?

[myroslav]

I'm considering bidder and applicant the equivalent terms, we are calling them suppliers, but in tender they are potential suppliers still.

[AlCollier]

Bids <> bidders. One bidder may legitimately submit multiple bids in some processes.

-----Original Message-----
From: "James McKinney" notifications@github.com
Sent: ‎19/‎11/‎2014 22:56
To: "open-contracting/standard" standard@noreply.github.com
Subject: Re: [standard] numberOfBids (Submitted or valid) (#141)

Proposal. A complex count:
{
"bidder_count": [
{
"label": "Eligible bidders",
"value": 10
},
{
"label": "Ineligible bidders",
"value": 2
}
]
}The simplest possible count:
{
"bidder_count": [
{
"value": 12
}
]
}—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.=

[jpmckinney]

@AlCollier Indeed. We aren't counting bids yet, just bidders. Whenever "number of bids" is added to OCDS, we will expect the number of bidders to differ from the number of bids in cases where bidders submit multiple bids.

[myroslav]

Are there processes that have single bid submitted by collective of several bidders?

[jpmckinney]

Yes, in jurisdictions where consortia are not legal entities but loose affiliations.

[AlCollier]

@jpmckinney @myroslav re the nomenclature issue suggest 'tenderers'.
It's a precise term, whereas other terms such as bidders and, in particular, applicants, may be confused with those who were eliminated at an earlier stage or those who applied for documents and then didn't tender.

[jpmckinney]

I'm okay with tenderer. It's less common but still used.

[myroslav]

It would be good to know if tenderer is "set in stone", since change management here takes some efforts and has some tension to change several times.

[jpmckinney]

Once this issue is closed, it's not expected to change. However, note that the recent OCDS release is a release candidate, so there should be an expectation for some changes.

[jpmckinney]

@myroslav To confirm, how many different counts would you have for bids? Is it just submitted versus valid as in Mihaly's example, or are there other statuses for which having a count would be an important use case?

[myroslav]

In fact, I do not understand value of these statistical data. We are going to store many data from the Tendering and Awarding process and can calculate the values, if they appear to be part of standard or valuable for other processes.

We will have following types of bids:

• total count of bids placed (length of bids)
• number of disqualified bids (number of awards with disqualified status).

Also we will have auction that we'll be having at least initial Bid.value and final Bid.value for each of the bids (potentially we can record auction process as well). We'll be storing only last valid value, and historical data could be obtained via change tracking.

[jpmckinney]

Mihaly shared the use case that, if there is a much lower number of valid bidders than total bidders, then it may be an indication of bidders being invalidated for small technical reasons (e.g. no page numbers on their bid) rather than for substantive reasons, and that such behavior could be an indication of bias or corruption.

Some systems may not track the bids themselves, but only metadata like number of bids/bidders. If you have all the data, then it's easy to calculate, but not everyone publishes all the data, and some disclosure laws may only require publishing metadata.

[jpmckinney]

@birdsarah @practicalparticipation Proposal is to restore numberOfBidders as numberOfTenderers. Thoughts?

The use cases around disqualification/validity are more concerned with bids than with bidders, so I think the various ways of counting bids/bidders should wait for a "bids" extension.

[practicalparticipation]

This looks very reasonable.

[birdsarah]

As my comment on the related issue. Although this explanation of why tenderers is more clear than bidders allays my fears somewhat.

[ekoner]

Re-opening this issue as Mexico airport have a need to report number of disqualified tenderers as well as numberOfTenderers. This looks similar to the issue raised by Myroslav.

Have invited team to elaborate their use case.

[timgdavies]

This is being taken forward in #379