A game theory model for the award of a public tender procedure

We propose a game theory model consisting of N suppliers competing in a non-cooperative manner for the award of a public tender based on the "Most Economically Advantageous Tender" (MEAT) criterion. According to the European legislation, the total score of each supplier is given by a weighted sum of the criteria set by the tender, which can be of a quantitative or qualitative nature. Suppliers are assumed to be smart and rational and, furthermore, scoring formulas are common knowledge. These formulas are assumed to be interdependent, so that each supplier cannot establish his own score a priori because his score depends on other suppliers' offers. We show that this problem can be formulated as a Nash Equilibrium model and that the governing Nash equilibrium conditions can be formulated as a variational inequality problem, for which we provide a result for the existence and uniqueness of the solutions. © 2023 World Scientific Publishing Company. All rights reserved.