Projects

@atilgandev Yes, that does sound right and much better actually. thank you. I'm not completely ready to commit to which rung comes first. That's one of the questions my paper's sequencing section needs to work through and this exchange helps. This is also what this Manifund request is for, the stability to sit with questions like this one properly instead of answering them between crises.

The closest example I can point to at the moment is the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, plurilateral, heavy on transparency. The empirical work on it finds lower corruption-risk indicators such as fewer single-bidder contracts, fewer wins piling up with one firm. A caveat is that the GPA bundles transparency with non-discrimination and open tendering, so transparency alone doesn't get full credit.

On confidentiality, the objection every disclosure proposal runs into, the Seoul Frontier AI Safety Commitments offer something borrowable. They cover safety-framework implementation rather than contract terms, but the structure is more important here. Disclose publicly, unless doing so increases risk or divulges commercially sensitive information out of proportion to the societal benefit and whatever can't be public still goes confidentially to trusted actors. That fallback is the useful part, I think. It maps neatly onto disclosing to a coalition secretariat instead of every member.

I think the weak point is that the carve-out is self-assessed, so the firm decides what counts as disproportionate. Designing verification around this kind of gap is one of the aspects my current paper is looking into. @atilgandev

@atilgandev Thank you for reading it. This is one of the questions I keep circling back to.

So far my view is transparency first. I don’t necessarily see it as the stronger safeguard but it's something a fragile coalition can implement. Shared procurement rules are the prize, but they demand harmonised standards, enforcement machinery, and members willing to refuse side-deals before there is enough trust. There's also a logical dependency. You can't harmonise terms you can't compare and disclosure produces the data shared rules require. Firm-side disclosure as a condition of participating in coalition tenders, rather than member self-reporting could be the firm's incentive to gain access to the pooled market.

Thank you Zahid @zahiidkbr

Congratulations and good luck!!!

Thank you, David @dwks

Thank you, James. You are a great teammate and friend @jk17015