Research

The evidence on what wins
a public tender.

What the academic literature actually establishes about winning public contracts — and what we measured ourselves, from a corpus of EU tenders, where the literature had nothing to say.

  1. Data note

    Four in five EU tenders don’t tell you how you’ll be scored

    A 27-country snapshot of machine-readable award criteria in TED · N = 10,252

  2. Research

    What actually decides who wins a public tender

    And why almost everything you’ve been sold about bid writing has never been tested

  3. Research

    The formula that scores you

    Your bid is not scored by a person. It is scored by an equation — and almost nobody reads it.

  4. Research

    When not to bid

    The most valuable decision in public procurement is the one to walk away

  5. Research

    The gate you didn’t know you could argue with

    Selection criteria feel like laws of nature. They aren’t — and most bidders never test them.

  6. Research

    What nobody has measured

    The most confidently-asserted claims in procurement have never been tested. Here’s what we intend to do about it.

Our data notes are computed from the corpus of EU tenders FindWell ingests from TED. Method and exclusions are stated in each piece. We publish findings that complicate our own pitch as readily as findings that support it.