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This paper investigates how the market orientation of SMEs toward public sector customers enables firms to participate and succeed in public procurement.

The authors used a survey-based methodology. First, the authors reconfigured an empirical construct of market orientation for private sector markets to measure the market orientation toward public sector customers. Then they conducted a survey of Finnish firms to test the construct and how it predicted firm performance in public procurement.

The authors find empirical support for firms to adopt a market orientation toward public sector customers. Their results suggest that customer and competitor orientations are positive predictors of participating and winning supply contracts in public sector tenders.

Self-reported survey data from a single country may limit the generalizability of results.

This paper is the first to report a market orientation toward public sector customers and describe how it is related to supplier performance in public procurement.

Public procurement of innovations (PPIs) addresses a specified need of the public-sector customer or aims at fostering private firms’ innovativeness. In an operational sense, issues of information asymmetry and risk sharing between the public agency and the supplier are of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the contract design issues of PPI.

Explicit and implicit contracting methods are reviewed, and a conceptual framework is proposed in which procurement characteristics are analyzed, focusing on the dimensions of the supplier’s sensitivity to the procurement risk and the power of implicit contracting methods.

Because of its complex nature, applying cost-plus contracts instead of more common fixed-price contracts is advisable in PPI.

Possible reasons for the more prominent role of contract design in the USA as opposed to the European Union procurement are discussed.

The aim is to examine the importance small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) see in different network partners regarding successful tendering in public procurement, and whether this perception predicts the number of joint bids and wins.

The data were collected by an electronic questionnaire which was sent to the registered users of the leading electronic platform for public procurement in Finland. The data were analysed with statistical methods.

The findings suggest that a favourable perception of the importance of horizontal networks in public procurement is associated with a larger number of joint bids and better success in joint bidding. However, the results do not establish a positive correlation between vertical networks and consortium bidding.

The data were collected from a single EU country. Since the criteria for bidding consortia may vary between countries, different results might have been achieved from other countries.

SMEs should be encouraged to form bidding consortia and acquire related experience. Policymakers should minimise barriers to consortium bidding, e.g. by offering more information. They should also assess the merits of joint bidding because they rarely encourage SMEs to bid as a consortium.

Consortium bidding is a way of enhancing SMEs’ possibilities to participate in public tender contests, even in large contracts.

While consortium bidding has been recognised to enhance SMEs’ possibilities of participating in public procurement, there is limited research into how SMEs’ network collaborations relate to bidding as a consortium.

This paper examines entry barriers to involvement in public procurement of small and medium-sized enterprises and the role of training in dismantling those barriers. We find that firms' perceptions of barriers are of five main types. Regression analysis shows that a lack of ongoing training is associated with SMEs' perceptions of resource constraints and practical skills that hinder their participation in public procurement. We also observe a positive connection between a positive attitude toward training and SMEs' participation rates in public procurement. As a managerial implication, the value of training should be appraised at the firm level, and organizing training and providing information concerning public procurement could be a recommended policy to improve the SME participation rate in public procurement.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have been found to be under-represented in the awarding of public sector procurement contracts. Currently, very little is known about the strategic and behavioral aspects associated with SMEsʼ participation in public sector procurement. To take a step in filling the gap, we used a conceptual construct known as market orientation (MO). The construct comprises a firmʼs orientation in gathering information on competitors and customers, and using the information to gain competitive advantage. This research found that MO has a positive effect on how active SMEs are in searching information on available requests for tenders and how actively they participate in bidding contests. This work strongly suggests that MO should be taken into account when designing procurement contracts, and MO should be fostered among SMEs.

Paying and repaying behavior are financial functions of great interest to private financial actors and public regulators, as also to academic researchers. The purpose of the paper is to empirically analyse paying and repaying behavior by combining theoretical insights from an emerging field in economics known as “culture and finance” with ideas from the economic analysis of social capital and trust in the context of different regulatory systems.

The present paper investigates with the help of panel data whether a culture of social trust and the scope of morality have an influence on paying and repaying behavior in different European and OECD countries.

The analysis shows that culture has an effect on firms' credit losses from the customers' payment defaults, on the overall riskiness of paying behavior and on the level of non‐performing bank loans. Also the complexity of law‐based regulation has an influence on paying and repaying behavior. The analysis also shows that high trust and morality are associated with less complex regulation and vice versa.

The results help private financial actors, regulators and public policy makers to design more appropriate behavioral environments for paying and repaying.

The paper provides the first analysis of an important issue and it serves both practical interest and further research on the topic.

The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of publications in the Journal of Public Procurement (JoPP) from 2001 to 2021. The study provides insights into trends in publications, prominent publication themes, influential authors, institutions and countries that have prominently been associated with the journal’s journey.

The study used a bibliometric and content analysis approach using the VOSviewer software to develop insights into the trends, structures and patterns in publications in the journal. Data for the study was extracted from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases.

The study established that there has been consistent growth in the number of papers published by the journal within the last two decades. Yearly average publication by the journal stood at 14 papers between 2002 and 2009, with the annual average rising to approximately 18 papers between 2010 and 2021. The trend in publication has been established and identified the influential citations and contributors to the journal. The study has also clustered out the thematic structures in journal’s publications. The prominent and emerging research issues in the public procurement environment needing immediate research attention have been highlighted.

The study is a one-journal bibliometric analysis and subsequently ignores publications on public procurement from other journals.

The findings of this study highlight to the research community the contributions of JoPP to the public procurement discourse and present important avenues for future research agenda.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first bibliometric study for the JoPP, providing detailed bibliometric indexes of the 21-year period of the journal’s publications. The study comprehensively analyses the contributions in the JoPP to assess the trend and scope in publications in the field of public procurement and draws attention to emerging concerns and critical issues of neglect requiring research attention in the journal.