Suchergebnisse

This paper offers an economic model to assist public procurement officials to rank competing vendors when benefits cannot be monetized. An important defense application is "source selection"—choosing the most cost-effective vendor to supply military equipment, facilities, services, or supplies. The problem of ranking public investment alternatives when benefits cannot be monetized has spawned an extensive literature that underpins widely applied decision tools. The bulk of the literature, and most government-mandated decision tools, focus on the demand side of a public procurement. The Economic Evaluation of Alternatives (EEoA) extends the analysis to the supply side. A unique feature of EEoA is to model vendor decisions in response to government funding projections. Given a parsimonious set of continuously differentiable evaluation criteria, EEoA provides a new tool to rank vendors. In other cases, it offers a valuable consistency check to guide government supplier decisions. ; Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Program

This version includes corrections, republished in the article of record: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10242694.2017.1318013 ; The article of record may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10242694.2017.1318013 ; This paper offers a simple strategic framework to help governments use various policy mechanisms to minimize public sector corruption. The paper offers a formal model that blends economics of crime models with identity economics and money laundering. It presents a partial equilibrium framework that focuses on a representative public official engaged in a mix of legal and illegal effort. The model introduces various levers a government might use to impact the costs and benefits of illegal effort. The ultimate goal is to help turn volatile vicious cycles of political instability, into steady virtuous cycles of stability, growth and sustainable development.

This paper offers a new approach to government vendor selection decisions in major public procurements. A key challenge is for government purchasing agents to select vendors that deliver the best combination of desired nonprice attributes at realistic funding levels. The mechanism proposed in this paper is a multiattribute first-price, sealed-bid procurement auction. It extends traditional price-only auctions to those in which competition takes place exclusively over attribute bundles. The model is a multiattribute auction in which a set of possible budget levels is specified. This model reveals the benefits of defining a procurement alternative in terms of its value to the buyer over a range of possible expenditures, rather than as a single point in budget-value space. This new approach leads to some interesting results. In particular, it suggests that in a fiscally constrained environment, the traditional approach of eliminating dominated alternatives could lead to suboptimal decisions. Finally, an extension of the model explicitly examines the buyer's decision problem under budget uncertainty by applying a utility function assessed over the value measure.

This paper offers a new approach to government's vendor selection decisions in major public procurements. A key challenge is for government purchasing agents to select vendors that deliver the best combination of desired non-price attributes at realistic funding levels. The mechanism proposed in this paper is a multiattribute first price, sealed bid procurement auction. It extends traditional price-only auctions to one in which competition takes place exclusively over attribute bundles. The model is a multiattribute auction in which a set of possible budget levels is specified. This model reveals the benefits of defining a procurement alternative in terms of its value to the buyer over a range of possible expenditures, rather than as a single point in budget-value space. This new approach leads to some interesting results. In particular, it suggests that in a fiscally constrained environment, the traditional approach of eliminating dominated alternatives could lead to sub-optimal decisions. Finally, an extension of the model explicitly examines the buyer's decision problem under budget uncertainty by applying a utility function assessed over the value measure.

Proceedings Paper (for Acquisition Research Program) ; This paper explores vendor selection decisions where competing vendors offer similar products with multiple non-price attributes. Traditional ''multi-attribute auctions'' such as the USAF Air Tanker competition include prices alongside other attributes in vendor proposals. Buyers generally select winning bidders using a weighted average of price and non-price attributes. A different approach is recommended here: to embed vendor prices directly in the buyer''s budget constraint. A first step is to conduct a simple multi-attribute auction with a fixed budget. The government buyer only evaluates vendor proposals that satisfy the budget constraint, choosing the proposal (non-price attribute bundle) which offers the greatest ''value for money'' (i.e., budget). The next step is to address budget uncertainty, expanding the model to incorporate a range of budgets. This leads to several interesting results, including that the traditional practice, and classroom technique, of eliminating dominated alternatives can lead to sub-optimal decisions. Improving public procurement decisions requires forecasting a range of future budgets, and soliciting information from vendors that allows procurement alternatives to be defined as functions of the value offered by each vendor over a range of budgets, rather than as a single point in budget-value (cost-effectiveness) space. Under more realistic budget scenarios, different vendor selection decisions will occur that benefit both troops and taxpayers. ; Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Program ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Sponsored Report (for Acquisition Research Program) ; The current fiscal crisis has placed unprecedented pressure on public procurements. A major target of future public spending cuts is likely to be defense expenditures. Within the defense budget, the biggest and most immediate targets are likely to be the acquisition of new equipment, facilities, services, and supplies. Addressing the growing global challenge of affordability, this paper offers a new approach to government''s vendor selection decisions in major public procurements. In the absence of profits to guide public procurement decisions, the challenge that faces a government buyer is to select the vendor that delivers the best combination of desired non-price attributes at realistic funding levels. The governance mechanism proposed in this paper is a multiattribute first price, sealed bid procurement auction. It extends traditional price-only auctions to one in which competition takes place exclusively over bundles of desired non-price attributes. The first iteration of the model is a multiattribute auction in which a fixed budget constraint is specified. Next, the model is expanded to incorporate a range of possible budget levels. This expanded model reveals the benefits to the buyer of defining a procurement alternative (vendor bid proposal) in terms of its value to the buyer over a range of possible expenditures, rather than as a single point in budget-value space. This new approach leads to some interesting results. In particular, it suggests that in a fiscally constrained environment, the traditional approach of eliminating dominated alternatives could lead to sub-optimal decisions. The final extension of the model explicitly examines the buyer''s decision problem under budget uncertainty. ; Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Program ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Symposium Presentation (for Acquisition Research Program) ; Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Program ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.