Intuition - the inevitable side to decision making : A study of the public procurement process

Sammanfattning: Public procurement is one of the most important functions of the government, and the decision-making process for the public buyers is filled with complex evaluation criteria and restrictions by the law. The purpose of this study has been to study the decision making done by public procurers and investigate whether they act completely rational in their decisions, or if there is any intuitive dimension affecting them. The purpose has also been to research which intuitive factors that exist in the public procurement context, and to what extent these affect the outcome of the decisions. An extensive literature review has been conducted, which was then used as a foundation for the data collection. Interviews have been held with employees at the public organization Trafikverket, or the Swedish Transport Administration. All interviews have been transcribed and analyzed with the help of a thematic analysis, which led to the resulting findings. Intuitive factors found in the literature were how the public buyers perceived the contractors brand, what their perception of tender value were, their personal experiences and their emotions. The data collection yielded some similar findings and some new. Emotions and experience were found to be of great importance when deciding, and the new findings include that the contractor perception as well as the public buyers’ communication had a significant impact. Due to the limited number of respondents and the single case study company, more research needs to be done in order to establish that these are in fact common intuitive factors in public procurement and thus to be able to generalize the findings.