Exploratory Data Analysis of Government Procurement Data to Influence Bidding Decision and Strategy in Albay, Philippines

This paper explores how open government data can be used to influence suppliers and contractors to participate in public bidding, by minimizing cost of information acquisition that influence bidding decision and strategy. The researcher conducted data scraping, pre-processing, and exploratory techniques on official procurement data of nineteen (19) Local Government Units (LGUs) in Albay, Philippines, and triangulated results with local government actors, contractors and businessmen from Albay Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The study showed that existing procurement data mandated by the Philippine procurement law to be released can answer 4 out of 6 key information requirements of bidders, thereby increasing overall bidding confidence. As an additional finding, data exploration revealed that procurement deadlines are not followed as prescribed by the Philippine procurement law.