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Governance preferences influence how public officials process performance data about service providers. Based on motivated reasoning theory, we examine the extent to which local delivery preferences—preferences for contracting with local service providers over contracting with non‐local ones—influence public managers' and politicians' interpretation of performance data. We firstly expect public officials to misinterpret evidence that contradicts their local delivery preferences and we, secondly, hypothesize that politicians are more prone to biases than public managers are. We test these hypotheses by conducting a randomized survey experiment among 4,000 public officials in Belgium. The results indicate that public officials tend to show a bias for local providers, but not for non‐local providers. Yet, we found no significant differences between politicians and public managers. Our study provides new evidence about the influence of governance preferences on the interpretation of performance information, and calls into question its effective use by politicians and public managers.

Governments are increasingly linking public procurement contracts to the attainment of secondary policy objectives. While not challenging the continuing dominance of price, this changes how service providers are selected. This study examines how public managers value environmental, innovative, and social goals against price in the public procurement of waste collection at the municipal level in Belgium. Using a discrete choice experiment, we study public managers’ valuation of secondary policy objectives. Additionally, to extend the external validity of our findings to different administrative structures, the same study has been replicated in three other countries (Norway, Germany, and Estonia). Although price remains crucial, we observe that public managers appear to be willing to pay more to increase the environmental, innovative, and social standards of public services.

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