Examining the Institutional Factors Affecting Cost Growth in Defense Acquisition: Additional Insights May Yield More Effective Policy Interventions

摘要

The U.S. Defense Department suffers from persistent, but not certain, cost growth within major acquisition programs. Over the past few decades, scores of empirical studies have examined the causes and consequences of cost growth and have shed light on characteristics of programs that fail to meet cost-performance goals. The question motivating the present study is: given the materiality of the problem (hundreds of billions of dollars), the number of times it has been studied, the attention of the highest levels of government, and numerous attempts to reform acquisition, why does the problem persist. What have the studies missed. Two recent and important deviations from the norm of past studies focused less on the acquisition program and more on the decisions made by officials about the program. This paper was motivated by those studies and was further informed by various literatures, including behavioral finance, group decision-making psychology, and organizational failure. The paper makes the case for the application of a framework taken from the worlds of political science and sociology to gain a better understanding of the problem of cost growth. The Institutional Analysis and Diagnosis (IAD) framework has been used to study the dynamics of complex decision-making processes involving collective resources. The data set is a collection of studies of defense acquisition cost growth from government organizations, academics, and think tanks. Using a software tool, the content of those reports is analyzed according to the IAD framework. The report then proposes a stream of research using the IAD framework -- in conjunction with theories of behavior finance, group decision- making, and organizational failure -- to improve our understanding of the dynamics and factors that result in cost growth. This framework has been successfully employed in other contexts to perform both qualitative field research and laboratory experimentation. (13 briefing charts are included).