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A judicial-enforcement form of passive waste

🟡 (interpretation) Taken together, the v10 results point to a judicial-enforcement form of passive waste. A one-sided sanction — a court order that compels delivery on a deadline — reliably secures the good, but it does so by bypassing the procurement routines that would otherwise aggregate demand and match buyers to suppliers. The selection-bounded under-the-gun gap of 15.9%–21.1% (AN-002), the near-zero within firm-buyer-item coefficient of 0.035 in deep repeated markets (AN-003), and the supplier-set reallocation across 2,134 item-buyer pairs with Jaccard overlap 0.268 and modal winner differing 70.2% of the time (AN-006) fit a single reading: the extra cost is not an incumbent supplier extracting a broad same-firm markup in deep repeated urgent markets, but the dissipation of scale and matching when urgent orders are split off into small, fast, fragmented purchases.

Economic intuition

The waste is "passive" in the exact sense of Bandiera, Prat & Valletti (2009): it arises with every actor behaving reasonably. The court secures delivery, the buyer meets the deadline, the supplier fills the small order in front of it — and the routine that batches demand and returns to known suppliers is what quietly disappears. No corruption, no opportunism, no villain: the cost is a by-product of how one-sided urgent enforcement collides with procurement structure.

The mechanism is passive in the precise sense that no party need behave opportunistically for the cost to arise. The court secures the patient's delivery; the buyer complies on the deadline; suppliers respond to the small, urgent order in front of them. What is lost is the organizational routine — batching demand, running a deeper tender, returning to an established supplier — that ordinary procurement uses to obtain lower prices. The waste is a by-product of how urgent enforcement interacts with procurement structure, sitting at the intersection of the bounded urgency gap, the deep-market same-firm null, and the documented supplier reallocation.

Caveat. This page is an interpretive synthesis of the three underlying analyses, not a separate estimate. "Passive waste" is a framing of the combined evidence and is not itself a measured quantity; the supporting numbers carry their own caveats (Lee bounds rest on monotonicity; the administrative channel is the closest feasible urgent-procurement comparison, not a random or clean assignment; winner-switching statistics are descriptive). The reading is 🟡 because the synthesis draws on single-source own-project estimates in São Paulo BEC alone.

Sources.