Extracting usual service prices from public contracts

Abstract

The paper describes a project of automatic selection, scraping, and full-text analysis of contracts in the area of IT and Information Systems. The purpose of the project was to extract manday prices and build the list of usual manday prices for particular roles that are stated in the contracts. The list aims to provide a foundation for sizing of new IT solutions before the public tender for an association of major state institutions of the Czech Republic. The result of the research is the list of usual prices for the specified roles, including blended rate, based on median and interval between quartiles, all with demonstrable links to origin contracts. The discussion states additional social factors to be considered when interpreting and using the resulting list, like the subjective influence of validators, tendency for generalization, or defensive attitude of affected vendors.

The Process of Unit Price Extraction from Public Sector Contracts

“…The price determination step is a matter of the statistical method of determining the usual price from the price data from individual contracts. It is beyond the scope of this text, published as separate paper (Bruckner & Vencovsky, 2020).…”

“…The detailed statistical results of the iterations are published as a conference paper (Bruckner & Vencovsky, 2020) and as reports for each iteration (Ministry of Internal Affairs, 2019a).…”