THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSPARENCY IN ELECTRONIC PROCUREMENT

The "Digital Single Market" strategy of European Commission promotes importance of e-standards, interoperability and data economy to achieve trust and transparency for economic growth. The impact of transparency on prices, market structure and information asymmetry reduction is widely studied but with controversial evidence. In the paper, we focus our research on understanding the complexity of transparency within e-procurement processes on data gathered from electronic reverse auctions. We have found that transparency is more complex problem with different significance according to different dimensions and environments. Results show, that the transparency has different impact on prices when comparing electronic reverse auction with sealed bids and in the situation of reverse auction negotiation where the most important for transparency impact has the number of participants.