Prof. Albert Sanchez-Graells: Digital Markets & Public Procurement – Gatekeeping & Experimentation
Prof. Albert Sanchez-Graells, Professor of Economic Law at the University of Bristol Law School.
A great opportunity to learn more on the relationship between competition law and public procurement – with a focus on international / comparative /digital aspects – from a leading academic voice in the area Prof. Albert Sanchez-Graells, Professor of Economic Law at the University of Bristol Law School. Albert just published a monograph with the Oxford University Press “Digital Technologies and Public Procurement Gatekeeping and Experimentation in Digital Public Governance” – an excellent opportunity to engage in a detailed conversation about the book and (far) beyond.
In addition to the main themes of the book we have also discussed
• Bid rigging and and digitalisation of procurement
• Atomisation as the main systemic problem of public procurement
• Dealing with the problems of how (not) to train algorithms
• How quickly the public sector is moving digital and is not it moving too quick?
• How much the public sector in the area of procurement is being captured and is there any effective treatment?
• What are the jurisdictions which can be seen as the global leaders in managing public procurement and what can we learn from them?
• Is public procurement about distributing subsidies and favouring local undertakings?
• Can we automate such complicated things as procurement?
Is automation only for zero-discretion public policies?
• What do we do wrong with automating public procurement?
• Is the hype about the omnipotence of automatisation of public procurement (as with the accuracy of matching of online advertising) a bit inflated?
• Are algorithms getting worse?
• How many different unknowns can never be computed?
• Do we see successes in cooperation between different jurisdictions in detecting and cooperating
• Public procurement as a tool of industrial policy
• Do we see more collaboration between EU and UK in comparison with competition law or less of (interests in) such collaboration?
• Is the technological lead in hands of private companies or public authorities?
• Automatisation and authoritarianism
• Is “move fast, change things” the best motto?
• The importance of Data Act and Data Governance Act
• Can the obligation to share public data be problematic and in what way?
• Recommendations to students
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The Digital Markets Research Hub is an independent academic initiative aiming at scrutinising the functioning of competition/regulation in digital markets. We host one-to-one interviews with leading policymakers, regulators and practitioners. We also organise online mini-workshops inviting high-profile experts and academics in various fields of digital competition law & policy to discuss the most vibrant issues of the ongoing regulatory reforms in digital markets. While having our clear normative stand on the matters discussed within the hub, we value different views and invite relevant stakeholders and thinkers representing the whole spectrum of reasonable positions on how to regulate competition in digital markets. All our materials are available at YouTube channel, which you are very welcome to subscribe to. The interview is organised & conducted by Prof. Oles Andriychuk, School of Law, University of Exeter, UK