Stéphane Saussier

juin 2025

New Publication in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

🗓 April 2025 | Volume 35, Issue 2 | Pages 148–163

Coauthored with Fernando Deodato Domingos, Carolyn Heinrich, and Mehdi Shiva:

“The interplay of discretion and complexity in public contracting and renegotiations.”

🧩 Overview:

Using data from over 80,000 contract modifications published on the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily platform, we explore how discretionary contracting procedures and transactional complexity affect public contract renegotiations.

Our findings show that:

• Discretion in contract award procedures is associated with more positively perceived and less opportunistic renegotiations;

• However, transactional complexity moderates this effect, often dampening the benefits of discretion.

⚖️ These results highlight the importance of balancing flexibility and safeguards in public contracting to foster cooperation while limiting risks of opportunism.

L'article est disponible ici 👉  🔗 ici 

🏆  Best Paper Award – IJCC

Mai 2025

🏆 Honored to Receive the Best Paper Award – IJCC

IJCC selects an outstanding paper each year to receive the Best Paper Award.

I am pleased to share that our article, “Navigating contract renegotiations with sustainability at the helm: Societal benefits and transaction costs” (Domingos, Heinrich, Saussier & Shiva, 2024), has received the Best Paper Award from the International Journal of Commerce and Contracting (IJCC).

Drawing on a unique dataset of over 80,000 EU public contract modifications, we provide empirical evidence that sustainability-driven renegotiations are associated with lower ex-post transaction costs and are not more likely to signal mismanagement.

These findings contribute to a growing body of work on sustainable public procurement and challenge prevailing assumptions about the risks associated with contract modifications in the public sector.

I would like to warmly thank my co-authors and the IJCC editorial board for this recognition. It is an encouraging signal that public governance research can meaningfully support both better performance and sustainability.

📄 Full reference: Domingos, F., Heinrich, C. J., Saussier, S., & Shiva, M. (2024). Navigating contract renegotiations with sustainability at the helm: Societal benefits and transaction costs. International Journal of Commerce and Contracting.

The paper is available here

31 mars 2025

Recent theoretical and empirical developments suggest that public contracts are characterized by intrinsic differences from private contracts, due to significant oversight and control by political opponents and interest groups, who have an interest in challenging and disrupting the contractual relationship. As a result, public contracts are more rigid and more frequently renegotiated than private contracts. This chapter provides a brief progress report on these recent studies and highlights the need to improve the tools currently available to public procurement departments by introducing more flexibility at the award stage (e.g., negotiation, discretion at the award stage) and at the execution stage (e.g., renegotiation of contracts). The appropriate utilization of this higher flexibility is contingent upon the quality of the institutional framework, as well as the integrity and competencies of public officials.

Le chapitre est disponible ici 👉 https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-50810-3_26

9 avril 2025

In this report,

👉 we present the different modes of private participation in infrastructure financing and their respective sectoral and regional importance, with a focus on the European Union (EU).

👉 We proceed with a review of the empirical evidence on the performance of PPP contracts, which is focused on renegotiations interpreted as a sign of bad PPPs management (i.e., inability to commit) in academic circles.

👉 We conduct a theoretical analysis of PPPs contracts, internalizing the risk of exogeneous shocks that might impact the contract profitability and justify renegotiations.

👉 We then conduct an empirical analysis of renegotiations in PPPs leveraging a new database from the EU to assess whether renegotiations respond to some efficiency imperative, or on the contrary, are the sign of bad management on the part of the authorities.

👉 We conclude with some policy recommendations.

📄 Download the full report:

👉 https://ow.ly/OMnS50VxfV9

📰 A summary of our findings is available in our VoxEU column:

👉 https://ow.ly/AqCX50VxfV8

Novembre 2024

Pour réussir la transition écologique, des investissements massifs dans les infrastructures et les bâtiments sont indispensables, pour décarboner, s’adapter au changement climatique et préserver la biodiversité. Ces investissements sont massifs : de l’ordre de 30 Mds € supplémentaires par an d’ici à 2030 hors adaptation. Pour les financer, ce rapport plaide pour une double stratégie : d’une part, mobiliser autant que possible les financements privés, dans une logique partenariale conforme à l’intérêt général et refondée à l’aune de la transition écologique, et, d’autre part, trouver de nouvelles sources pour satisfaire les besoins de financements publics, qui resteront en tout état de cause très élevés.

Par

• Benoît Thirion Avocat

• un groupe de travail composé de Cécile Fontaine, Hélène Hoepffner, Emmanuel Pélisson et Stéphane Saussier

Publié le 18 novembre 2024

Disponible ici  

Contract modifications: good in practice, bad in theory? Exploring

new data concerning Italy

Mai 2025

This paper explores the issue of renegotiation in Italian public procurement contracts, offering a new perspective through the use of original data. We focus on the European Union directives introduced in 2014 and implemented since 2016, which aim to enhance transparency in contractual renegotiations (Directives 2014/23/EU, 2014/24/EU, 2014/25/EU). These directives are the first to address both the execution and award procedures of public contracts, mandating that public contractors disclose significant contract modifications.

Using web-scraped contract modification notices (CMNs) published between January 2016 and December 2023 in Italy, we compile a dataset of 1,577

CMNs after data. To assess how renegotiations are perceived by public authorities, we conduct a sentiment analysis of the justifications provided for these modifications. Our preliminary results suggest that renegotiations are not viewed negatively by public authorities, with many justifications emphasizing cooperative behaviors between contracting parties.

See the article here :https://economiaitaliana.org/wp-content/uploads/EI_2024_3_02_S_Saussier_D-compressed.pdf