## 1 Introduction
In the last decade, there is an accelerated rhythm of awareness and learning at the national level, reinforced by recent legislative developments in the field. Starting with 2007, the year of EU integration, Romania has adopted the European legislation in the field of public procurement, introducing for the first time the criteria for green procurement. The European regulations, transposed at national level, aim to better include environmental and social responsibility and innovation considerations in the public procurement process. We refer to the provisions of Law no. 69/25.04.2016 regarding green public procurement, respectively, Order no. 1652/15.10.2018 [8] for the approval of the Guide for green public procurement, which defines the national legal framework in the field of green procurement, which includes the minimum environmental protection demand for certain groups of products and services included in the specifications. To these two regulations, there is added the legislative project regarding the \"National Plan for Green Procurement\", which will introduce for the Romanian public institutions and authorities the imperative of green procurement, in a minimum percentage of the total public procurement, in the spirit of sustainable economic thinking. Sustainable development goals, including 'green procurement', are important milestones that could underpin the administrative system initiatives. In Romania, companies could opt for green procurement to reduce their environmental impact. Through the use and commercialization of green products, the companies not only green these activities, but they also transfer this effect to their supplier requesting them green products, and these, instead, could pass their preference for green products to the suppliers, promoting, in this way, sustainable development to a larger scale. Green procurement could be adopted by both public and private companies, in the first case being labeled as green public procurement (GPP). GPP was defined as:\"a process whereby public and semi-public authorities meet their needs for goods, services, works and utilities by seeking and choosing outcomes and solutions that have a reduced impact on the environment throughout their whole life-cycle, as compared to conventional products/solutions. A procurement procedure will be considered as 'green' only if it has led to the purchase of a substantively 'greener' product and only if the environmental characteristics of this product go beyond what needs to be complied with on the basis of European or national environmental legislation.\" [5]  
International authorities, such as the EU, the UN or EU member states, guide sustainable procurement, addressing the three lines of sustainability [4]. In Romania, for example, _\"The guide for green public procurement that includes the minimum requirements regarding the environmental protection for certain groups of products and services that are required in the specifications\"_ was approved in October 2018 [8]. The GPP guide contains minimum requirements for environmental protection for priority product groups and/or services: new indoor and outdoor furniture, copy and graphic paper, collection, furniture reconditioning services, and reuse services for the furniture at the end of the lifecycle, transport vehicles, food and catering services, IT equipment and office cleaning products and services. The aim of this study is to develop a behavioral model of rational expectations in the green procurement market, in order to determine the influence of the behavior of the undertakings on a competitive environmental market. To achieve this goal, a partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method was applied and the statistical software Smart-PLS 3.2.8 was used. This paper is structured as follows. Firstly, we discuss the impact of green procurement on competition as it was reflected in the economic literature. After that, the research hypotheses are presented and tested.