Yes. I have made it sound like that because I wanted it to sound exactly like that. The "official" motivating force is the one you mentioned, but that doesn't

Yes. I have made it sound like that because I wanted it to sound exactly like that. The "official" motivating force is the one you mentioned, but that doesn't mean that it is the actual one, nor that lowest bid is actually the best possible formula[0]. It is the up-to-date "the algorithm made me do it" version of the "officer, the devil made me do it" excuse when (if) the project is delayed or goes over budget, the builders are usually considered the culprits (whether it is actually their fault or not) and they were selected by applying the algorithm (so all is fine). Consider how you (private person) would normally award the construction of your house, likely you would: 1) find a list of local contractors (mostly from world of mouth) 2) get from 3-5 of them offers 3) compare them, analyze them with your arhitect/engineer, talk with offerers about possible mistakes/inconsistencies 4) finally choose the builder (more often than not you will choose not the lowest bidder but rather the one that overall seems to you more capable/reliable/interested in the work) With what a (say) local council would probably do to build (still say) a small school: 1) publish a request for bids 2) obtain anything between (say) 10 and 200 offers 3) award the contract to the lowest (and valid according to the algorithm) offer It is clear that in your private case you have no incentive for corruption, but - in order to avoid the risk of corruption - the council just awarded the contract to a "number". This "number", more likely than not, is the result of "blind shooting", the builders need a certain number of contracts and they need to make many offers, and have no time to analyze them in detail. [0] as a matter of fact "pure" lowest bid is relatively rare there are usually a number of corrective items either in the algorithm or in the norms regulating the bid, in some cases they can be effective, in some cases they introduce some perverse incentives to the offerers.