considering how some mechanisms are intertwined with multiple outcome groups and why some of our expectations are a priori ambiguous.

27. First, e-procurement is expected to lower intentional barriers to entry, by making it harder for public officials to create some types of barriers for unwanted competitors. E-procurement can automatically ensure compliance with procurement rules and hence reduce discretion. For example, automatically publishing notices about new tenders on a national website makes it difficult to hinder undesired competitors from accessing information about tender opportunities (Coviello et al., 2018). As e-procurement enables firms to download tender documents and submit bids online, it also makes intentional barriers obsolete that rely on enhancing the cost of bid submission––such as through physical violence, complex administrative procedures, or by denying receipt of tenders from unwanted bidders. This is particularly salient in Bangladesh, as extortion and the use of physical violence to limit competition were widespread under paperbased procurement.

28. E-procurement is also expected to lower intentional barriers to entry because it makes rent-seeking riskier. It produces an easily accessible electronic audit trail13 about the decisions leading to contract award (bid evaluation), facilitating managerial oversight and audit and hence increasing the risk of getting caught (Di Tella & Schargrodsky, 2003; Olken, 2007). This risk is salient in Bangladesh’s context because the CPTU uses e-procurement data for proactively monitoring procurement risks14 and has full authority to act on findings. This may motivate rent-seeking officials to go clean or to adopt strategies that are not easily detectable in electronic records.15 Consequently, if substitute strategies are unavailable, we expect e- procurement to unambiguously reduce intentional entry barriers.

29. However, e-procurement need not lower intentional barriers to entry if collusive agents16 find alternative strategies for raising these barriers.17 They may respond to reduced discretion or tighter monitoring in one part of the procurement process by substituting rent-seeking strategies away to other procurement phases (Dávid-Barrett & Fazekas, 2020). For example, once e-procurement makes it impossible to prevent competitors from bidding, connected or corrupt firms could switch to a “lowballing”

> 13 The audit trail comprises detailed records of public procurement procedures and personalized records of actions (administrators log in with unique IDs and their clicks are recorded to the second). Compared to paper-based records (which are stored in deconcentrated PEs), these electronic records are relatively hard to purge without being noticed and easily accessible to auditors. 14 See for example the PROMIS reporting tool: https://cptu.gov.bd/promis/promis-content.html 15 However, the deterrent effect of audits depends heavily on the commitment of political and administrative principals to use audits to fight corruption. In Bangladesh, we expect this commitment to be relatively low on average and heterogeneous across PEs interacting with local politics.

> 16 “Collusive agents” is here used as an umbrella term to jointly refer to firms, public officials, and politicians engaging in corruption in the procurement process.

> 17 Such strategies could, for example, comprise (i) tailoring the tender criteria for specific bidders, (ii) excluding bids based on superficial administrative grounds as ineligible, or (iii) using subjective assessment criteria unfairly for scoring bidders (Fazekas & Kocsis, 2015).

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