Overpricing Analysis in Brazilian Public Bidding Items

Analyzing overpricing in public bidding items is essential for government agencies to detect signs of fraud in acquiring public goods and services. In this context, this paper presents two main contributions: a methodology for processing and standardizing bid item descriptions and a statistical approach for overpricing detection using the interquartile range. We evaluated a comparative analysis of three distinct grouping strategies, each emphasizing different facets of the item description standardization process. Furthermore, to gauge the efficacy of both proposed approaches, we leveraged a ground-truth dataset for a thorough evaluation containing quantitative and qualitative analyses. Overall, our findings suggest that the evaluated strategies are promising for identifying potential irregularities within public bidding processes.