The Invisible Wall: An Analysis of Metropolitan Procurement Regulations in the United States

Across municipal governments, the vast and varied web of purchasing regulations known as procurement has effectively grown into a barrier to entry for the civic technology market, allowing government contracts to be secured by a few large software companies with the resources to move through the pro...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Cunanan, Kenneth M
Format: Others
Published: Scholarship @ Claremont 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1058
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2025&context=cmc_theses
Description
Summary:Across municipal governments, the vast and varied web of purchasing regulations known as procurement has effectively grown into a barrier to entry for the civic technology market, allowing government contracts to be secured by a few large software companies with the resources to move through the procurement process. Within the procurement process, the procurement threshold, an arbitrary dollar amount set by the municipal governments, determines how governments are able to purchase goods and services from vendors. Through an OLS regression model, we examine the relationship between proven economic growth factors within cities, and the city’s procurement threshold. We find that there is a significant negative correlation between the number of patents issued for a particular city and the city’s procurement threshold, indicating that there may be a negative relationship between patent adoption and procurement thresholds within a city.