The Transparency Paradox: How Digital Accountability Can Inflate Public Costs in Low-Trust Environments

This repository contains the supplementary materials, statistical models, and textual analysis data supporting the research article "The Transparency Paradox: How Digital Accountability Can Inflate Public Costs in Low-Trust Environments". Published in the Journal of Management in Engineering (ASCE), this study investigates the economic impacts of digital governance reforms, specifically examining how a mandatory e-procurement reform (EKAP) in Turkey paradoxically triggered significant cost escalation amidst macroeconomic volatility. Methodology Overview: The provided datasets and supplementary files support a dual-pronged analytical strategy designed to isolate the policy's causal impact and identify its institutional mechanisms: Causal Inference Models: Data supporting the fortified difference-in-differences interrupted time series (DiD-ITS) model and the Synthetic Control Method (SCM). These models compare Turkey's cost trajectory (2014–2023) against a composite control group of five regional peers (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Serbia) to disentangle the policy effect from concurrent currency crises. Computational Text Analysis: Outputs related to the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling applied to a corpus of 498 official documents (2017–2021). This analysis tracks the institutional discursive shift toward formal compliance and reporting. Predictive Forecasting: Data supporting the Vector Autoregression (VAR) model used to forecast the persistence of construction costs for the 2024–2025 period. Key Findings Supported by this Repository: The EKAP reform caused a statistically significant 2.15 percentage-point quarterly acceleration in public construction costs, completely independent of the powerful inflationary effects of the currency crisis. This cost acceleration was driven by a "friction premium"—the costs of new administrative burdens and regulatory risks that firms rationally priced into their tenders. The data validates the "friction premium multiplier," a generalizable mechanism explaining how mimetic digital reforms can paradoxically fail in low-trust contexts when they prioritize symbolic legibility over substantive market efficiency. Recommended Citation: If you utilize the data, codes, or supplementary materials provided in this repository, please cite the original peer-reviewed article: Uğural, M. N., & Aghili, S. (2026). The Transparency Paradox: How Digital Accountability Can Inflate Public Costs in Low-Trust Environments. Journal of Management in Engineering, 42(4), 04026017. https://doi.org/10.1061/JMENEA.MEENG-7434.