公共产品技术创新过程中的政府偏袒策略

Public Discrimination Strategy in Public Goods Technological Innovation

政府部门通过招标采购的方式从公共科研机构或企业获取所需技术推动公共产品技术创新。以买方决定的逆向拍卖理论和寻租竞争理论为基础,分析了投标者之间信息完全与信息不完全条件下,政府部门为实现既定福利目标所确定的最优偏袒规则问题以及具体实施偏袒规则的条件。研究表明,当投标者之间信息完全时,最优偏袒规则主要由投标者获得租金的差异程度,政府部门的偏好以及产品技术优势提高对获得租金可能性的影响程度所决定;当投标者信息不完全时,最优偏袒规则应该在公平竞争与完全偏袒技术能力较高的投标商之间确定。

Technological innovation of public goods is defined as the process of developing new products to meet social public needs and generating social economic benefits through the applied research,technological development,transformation and application.Few researches have studied the relationship between public goods and innovation process by considering public discrimination.We add the factor of public discrimination to public sector＇s tool box containing the possible means （control variables） to analyze the effect of political culture and valuation asymmetry on optimal discrimination rules during the process of public product technological innovation.Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given rent.For instance,governments procure innovational products from private enterprises and public R＆D organizations to efficiently provide non-excludable public goods.Public discrimination often occurs and is controlled by contest designers.Our initial task is to clarify why this is indeed the case in the complex institutional environment based on buyer-determined reverse auction and rent-seeking theories.We consider situations under which equilibrium strategies exist and rent-seeking expenditures heterogeneous players choose in both imperfectly discriminating contest and perfect discriminating competition.We analyze the case in which players may have different values for the rent and their values are complete information.Under the perfect discrimination competition,the contest designer chooses the optimal value of discrimination based on the ratio of contestants＇ prize valuations.For low values of λ,where the parameter λ is the weight assigned to bidders＇ expected payoff,the designer wishes to extract buyer‘s surplus from the contestants so that the optimal bias accomplishes the designer＇s attempt to maximize the extent of competition between the contestants.For high values of λ,the designer wishes to maximize the total utilities of contestants and sets the optimal bias in order for high ability contestants to receive the rent.Under the impedect discrimination competition,for some intermediate weight λ,public sectors create actual equality between competitors.When λ is smaller than λ,the equilibrium bias is in favor of contestant with the lower prize valuation.We compare the cases in which contestants have different values for the rent and their values are contestants＇ private information.Under perfect discrimination competition,the bias in favor of contestant who has high value for renting is complete and no efforts are made by the other contestant.Under imperfect discrimination competition,for some low values of λ,there is no discrimination and the designer creates equality between competitors.In summary,in the real complex contest environment discrimination is often administrated by public sectors and the objective of these contest designers reflects its political culture.This paper contributes new insights into the political economy of discrimination in public product technological innovation and demonstrates that political preference and asymmetry in the contested prize valuations are useful explanatory factors to understand diversity and discrimination in different societies.