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In softening price competition at the tendering stage, a bidding ring may jeopardize the buyer‘s effort to award a procurement contract at her most advantageous economic conditions. By exploiting the similarities between oligopolistic and procurement markets, we discuss how structural conditions of the procurement market such as the presence of barriers to entry, demand fluctuations, frequency of interactions among suppliers and market transparency affect the sustainability of collusive agreements among participants in a tendering process. We then evaluate the extent to which some aspects of the tendering design such as the choice of tendering format, and in particular of the scoring rule, the constraints on bidding consortia and subcontracting may enhance price competition and limit the risk of successful bid-rigging.