دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله یک مدل خرید دولت الکترونیک مبتنی بر اعتبار (نشریه الزویر 2016)

یک مدل خرید دولت الکترونیک مبتنی بر اعتبار

A reputation based electronic government procurement model

Abstract

Each year, governments spend billions in procurement. In this context, they generally select their suppliers based on the minimum price. However, other criteria than price may be considered to help governments minimize the procurement costs. This paper proposes a formal reputation model that is intended to determine the winners of a public procurement process. The proposed model combines three elements: (1) the direct reputation of the supplier, (2) the indirect reputation of the supplier, and (3) the difference in beliefs between the government and the supplier. The proposed model compares situations where reputation is integrated along price for selecting suppliers and where it is not. Results show that the proposed reputation model may lead to lower costs for governments.

1 Introduction

E-government aims at making the interactions between the government and citizens (G2C), the government and businesses (G2B), and inter-agency relationships (G2G) more cooperative, convenient, and transparent (Mellouli & Bouslama, 2009), (Chourabi & Mellouli, 2011). It should lead to better delivery of services to citizens, improved interactions with businesses and industries, less corruption within governmental agencies, increased transparency, greater convenience, higher revenue growth, and finally cost reduction (Schelin, 2003), (Davison, Wagner, & Ma, 2005), (Affisco & Soliman, 2006). This paper focuses on G2B relations specifically in the case of public procurement. Public procurement is the process by which governmental agencies acquire goods, services and works from third parties. Governments may adopt different regulations for procurement processes that can range from selective outsourcing to large outsourcing deals (Cordella & Willcocks, 2012). For example in Canada, there are two types of public procurement processes: competitive procurement process (large outsourcing) and non-competitive procurement (selective outsourcing) process. The calls for competitive or non-competitive processes depend on the value and the type of contracts (Canadian Government, 2015). The Government of Canada spends more than 16.05 billion dollars of purchasing per year(Canadian Government, 2015). However, and as stated in (Cordella & Willcocks, 2012), it is not always ensured that outsourcing activities to third parties will be successful. For example, in the case of Information Technology (IT) projects in the United Kingdom, one in eight IT projects was a failure considering time, cost, and specification (UK Government, 2003). These failures are not only the responsibility of governments but they are shared with supplying companies. Hence, by participating in different projects that can end by either a success or a failure, a company can build its own reputation: is it a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ supplier? Generally, governments would prefer to work with ‘good’ companies. This paper is a first attempt to provide a model to compute the reputation of a company so that governments can work with ‘good’ ones with the objective to decrease the number of failed publically-funded projects. The objective of this paper is to propose a formal reputation model for determining the winners of an e-government procurement based on both the price and the suppliers’ reputations. We propose to compute the reputation of a supplier by combining three elements: (1) the direct reputation, (2) the indirect reputation, and (3) the difference in beliefs, and taking into account five parameters: (a) the negotiation field, (b) the arrangement weight, (c) the arrangement time, (d) the reliability degree, and (e) the importance degree of the supplier. An exhaustive experimental study is conducted to outline the potential gains that could be obtained by using the proposed reputation model when compared to the case where only bidding prices are taken into account. Our study considers the particular case of transportation procurement where a governmental agency sends a request for proposals (RFP) to select a set of carriers to ensure some of its transportation operations (for example, transport of recyclable materials). We also investigate the impact of adding knowledge on the government total expected cost by considering different alternatives when computing the carrier reputation. Finally, we analyse different situations to take into account the behaviour of the governmental agency with regard to risk. In other words: should a government agency always contract with suppliers with which it has a good past relations with or should it open the bids to ”new” suppliers with which it has no past relations? The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a literature review on the reputation in public procurement. Section 3 identifies the three elements and the five parameters used to build the reputation model. It describes the proposed formal reputation model. Section 4 presents the experimental results. Section 6 discusses the possibility of integration of reputation systems in the e-government procurement system. This section concludes the paper and opens on future research directions.