14(34)
Further, procurement officials do not exercise full authority over
procurement decisions. Sometimes, their recommendations are
overruled by decision-makers at higher levels.
How should this wide spectrum of behavioral patterns be rendered
analytically in a model supposed to cover in principle any procurement
situation? The problem is somewhat reminiscent of the classical problem
of modeling agents in economic theory. The traditional starting point
here has been the selfishly rational agent, who cares only about his or her
own assets or profits without side glances at those of fellow human beings.
This reduction cuts both ways. We know that actual human beings are
led by altruistic preferences in some situations but by spite, jealousy, and
other similarly problematic vices in other contexts. In this way, the
Homo
economicus
of economic theory represents a
neutral
compromise between
deviations in either direction. In Collard’s (1978, p. 6) words:
To be sure, economic man is incapable of sympathy, benevolence or love.
But he is also incapable of envy, malevolence and hatred. In short, he is
splendidly neutral to others. […] Self-interest, it may therefore be argued,
is a neutral or middle assumption and certainly more attractive than envy,
malice or hatred.
It is necessary to distinguish between the methodological concept of
economic man and more realistic versions. The former, taking the form of
expected utility-maximizing consumers or profit-maximizing producers that
have full information and unlimited capacities for computation, is known to
be incorrect, and in certain applications, the basic model is also refined to
account for, for instance, incomplete information or bounded rationality.
Nonetheless, the simple standard model is adequate for many applications.
The question is how the
Homo bureaucraticus
, acting in the role of public
procurement officer, should be rendered in a model. At one extreme is the
omniscient civil servant who is so well informed and has such moral fiber
that the regulatory framework is superfluous; at the other end of the
spectrum is the corrupt official who will not hesitate to take bribes in
exchange for choosing inferior alternatives in any procurement operation.
A reasonable and manageable analytical solution to the problem of finding
a middle way corresponding to the neutrality of
Homo economicus
is to
define the
expected value
of the underlying distribution as the reference
point. This corresponds to a hypothetical situation in which the procuring
official would choose a supplier at random from the distribution.
