Whatever happened to competition in space agency procurement? The case of NASA

Whatever Happened to Competition in Space Agency Procurement? 233

FFP series show a marginally increase since the early 1990s indicating that the
FBC policy did not have a major effect on this type of contract. This means that
NASA during the second half of the mid-1990s moved from placing greater emphasis
on rent extraction to placing increased priority on cost minimization, reflected in a
decreasing proportion of contracts awarded under cost-reimbursement schemes.

Figure 3. Contract types employed by NASA as a percentage

CPFF

CPAF

INC

FFP

Notes: CPAF, INC, FFP and CPFF stand for Cost plus award fee, incentive, firm fixed price
and cost plus fixed fee respectively. All variables are percentages of the total value
awarded annually. Data sources: NASA (1983) to (2004a).

In order to test whether there was a substitution effect between non-competitive
contacts and CPAF contracts by NASA towards controlling rent to the industry,
the equation in Table 2 was estimated with the inclusion of LCPAF (the logarithm
of CPAF). This had no impact on the explanatory power of the equation; in addition
the tests on the significance of right hand variables indicated its absence for
LCPAF. Overall, correlation and visual inspection indicate the absence of a
meaningful link between all the explanatory variables of the behavior of the level of
competitive tendering (LNASAnc) and the type of contract distribution (LCPAF),
with the exception of budget size (LSENASA). This means that changes in

<<   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   >>

More intriguing information