Determinants of the Success of Cooperative Public Procurement

Abstract Governments at all levels face pressures to provide the best quality services by optimizing expenditures. Collaborative governance, which has been advanced as a tool to improve public service delivery, is widely discussed in mainstream public administration literature. However, few scholars have addressed it from the perspective of Cooperative Public Procurement (CPP). In this paper, we examine the potential determinants of CPP as we consider it a form of collaborative governance. Through the lens of transaction costs theory and prior management literature, we hypothesize that information, negotiation, enforcement costs, joint gains, and fiscal and political pressures are the determinants of collaborative governance. Using ordered logistic models, we found that governments’ engagement in cooperative public procurement mostly depends on the benefits of CPP instead of the costs. That is, governments place more weight on the benefits than the costs of collaborative arrangements when making cooperative public procurement decisions.