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Pinheiro, MF (2024)

Newcomb-Benford Law in public procurement contracts

Master Thesis, NOVA Information Management School, Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: Not available at this time.



Abstract: This Master's thesis explores the application of the Newcomb-Benford Law in public procurement contracts in Portugal, aiming to validate the alignment of contract values with the expected distribution. The research involves a comprehensive analysis of public procurement data, visualizing and exploring the distribution of observed leading digits against Benford's Law and validating the distribution with statistical tests. The findings indicate an acceptable level of conformity with Benford's distribution due to the values encountered by the Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) across different subsets of the dataset but also shed light on potential red flags in the procurement values due to the non-conformity results of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Chi-Square tests. The study emphasizes the importance of using well-tested methods to identify anomalies in public procurement data without explicitly implicating corruption. The research concludes by highlighting the need for further investigation using more robust statistical methods and machine learning to enhance the validity of the results.


Bibtex:
Not available at this time.


Reference Type: Thesis

Subject Area(s): Economics, General Interest