Události

Presenter: Abylay Tursyn, a PhD student at Narxoz University

Title: "Who Stays and Who Leaves? Behavioural Typology and Market Exit in Electronic Public Procurement."

Abstract: Electronic procurement platforms generate large supplier populations whose long-run sustainability is poorly understood. Most research on public procurement focuses on competition intensity or buyer savings; supplier attrition — and its structural causes — remains understudied. This paper examines why the majority of registered suppliers exit the market within three years, using longitudinal administrative data from Kazakhstan’s national e-procurement platform. In our analysis we apply K-means clustering on ten supplier-level behavioural features to identify five structurally distinct profiles: Niche Winners (22.8%), Local Volume (27.9%), Services (17.4%), Discount Specialists (8.3%), and Mobile High-Freq (23.5%). Kaplan-Meier survival estimates and a Royston-Parmar flexible parametric survival model then characterize time-to-exit by cluster and entry cohort. Entry cohort effects are pronounced: suppliers entering in 2024 face 2.93× the exit hazard of 2022 entrants, consistent with the transaction cost shock introduced by Kazakhstan’s January 2025 procurement reform. Drawing on Transaction Cost Economics and Organizational Ecology, we argue that the five clusters map cleanly onto the generalist-specialist distinction in ecology theory: narrow-niche specialists (Services, Niche Winners) and capital-intensive specialists (Discount Specialists) sustain platform participation, while wide-niche generalists (Mobile High-Freq) exit rapidly despite high bidding activity. The five-cluster typology brings the organizational ecology framework to its full empirical resolution on a transaction-cost-heavy digital platform, revealing strategic positions that a coarser typology would hide. The findings have direct implications for SME support programme design and procurement reform sequencing in emerging economies.