Abstract

When governments buy products and services, the purchase price reflects not just the seller’s production costs, but also the costs of making the exchange occur. How much selling businesses spend and for which activities has important implications for the management activities governments need to execute to increase the likelihood of a successful exchange. This article develops a framework for analyzing businesses’ transaction cost spending across varying circumstances of selling products to governments. Using unique data from two original surveys of private businesses in Denmark, we provide a rare portrait of how much sellers spend across several categories of contract management activities. Consistent with extant research, we show that these expenditures are lower when selling products with less risky attributes. We also find lower expenditures when businesses have contracted with governments in the past, a finding that suggests that experience can lower the risks of a failed transaction. These results suggest that governments need to calibrate their purchasing activities not only to the circumstances of the exchange, but also to the businesses’ own transaction cost spending.

摘要

当政府购买产品和服务时，购买价格不仅反映了卖方的生产成本，还反映了使交换发生的成本。销售企业花费多少以及哪些活动对政府需要执行的管理活动具有重要影响，以增加成功交换的可能性。本文开发了一个框架，用于分析企业在向政府销售产品的不同情况下的交易成本支出。我们使用来自丹麦私营企业的两项原始调查的独特数据，提供了卖家在几类合同管理活动中花费的罕见画像。与现有研究一致，我们表明，当销售具有较低风险属性的产品时，这些支出较低。我们还发现，当企业过去与政府签订合同时，支出会降低，这一发现表明，经验可以降低交易失败的风险。这些结果表明，政府不仅需要根据交易所的情况，还要根据企业自身的交易成本支出来调整其采购活动。