Search results for "government procurement"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Are discriminatory procurement policies motivated by protectionism ?
1995
When purchasing goods and services, governments often discriminate in favour of domestic suppliers. It is widely assumed that such behaviour is motivated by protectionism. Although this interpretation is sometimes valid, it is also puzzling. After reviewing some of the puzzles, the paper proposes an alternative explanation of preferential procurement based on the assumption that governmental buyers want to purchase goods and services at minimum cost, but must do this in a context in which, because of the presence of unverifiable services, contracts are necessarily incomplete. The paper argues that preferential purchasing can guarantee the efficient delivery of these unverifiable services.
The public procurement of information systems: dialectics in requirements specification
2017
When acquiring information systems, public entities face a dilemma. On the one hand, they want to procure the system that best suits their needs, which often requires lengthy dialogues with vendors. At the same time, they are restricted by government regulations that mandate limited dialogue in the interests of transparency and equal opportunities for all vendors. To examine how public entities deal with this, we followed three procurement projects in Norway. We show that this dilemma manifests itself as a dialectic between the thesis of getting the system requirements right and the antithesis of strictly adhering to regulations. Public entities search for a resolution of this dialectic thr…