Comedy isn’t really the brief here, but the draft has a steady current of dry, deadpan academic wit. The funniest moments are usually where the prose stays scholarly while describing something quietly absurd. A few favourites:
1. The procurement market does isomorphism so you don’t have to. (#MQBJQ8)
“Suppliers, as rational agents, optimise for what the evaluation actually measures rather than for what the buyer ultimately needs… suppliers invest in producing increasingly elaborate documentation, accumulating certifications whose relevance to delivery quality is marginal, and formatting proposals to match evaluation conventions rather than to communicate genuine insight. The process rewards legibility over substance.”
That last sentence is almost a haiku. Whole pages of procurement-reform literature collapsed into seven words.
2. The “counterintuitive” finding that lighter regulation produces less competition. (#ET42TV)
“Small procurements, which operate under lighter regulatory requirements and shorter timelines, show a higher single-bid rate (36.6%) than open tenders (32.0%)… This is counterintuitive if procedural complexity were the binding constraint: simpler procedures should attract more bidders, not fewer.”
The deadpan setup of the obvious policy assumption, followed immediately by data shrugging.
3. Company-type buyers, quietly tanking. (#UKV3UQ)
“Company-type buyers (private entities conducting regulated procurement, n = 56) show the highest single-bid rate at 46.4%.”
Nearly half of their tenders attract one bidder, and the prose proceeds calmly to attribute this to “narrow supplier markets” and “lower visibility… in supplier monitoring systems.”
4. IT procurement diagnosed in the tone of a medical chart. (#GW68JP)
“IT services (CPV 72) exhibit the most severe competition deficit: half of all tenders receive a single bid… The combination of elevated Gate 2 cost and structurally fragile Gate 1 conditions produces the pattern the model predicts: a sub-market where both gates constrain simultaneously.”
“Both gates constrain simultaneously” is a beautifully bureaucratic way of saying the system has, technically, broken.
5. Academic understatement of the year. (#SYKG4J)
“Persistent single bidding is rarely economically benign…”
Rarely. Benign. Both load-bearing.
6. The institution that doesn’t know what it’s doing. (#D72ZMS)
“The authority may not conceptualise its tender design as a screening menu, but the economic effect is the same.”
This is the thesis’s recurring comic move — buyers don’t realise they’re running a Spencean separating equilibrium, but they’re running one anyway, and it’s not going well.
If you want a single line for an epigraph or a defence joke, #MQBJQ8’s “the process rewards legibility over substance” is the cleanest one-liner in the draft.