Understanding and Mitigating Protests of Department of Defense Acquisition Contracts

Predicting bid protests: what should sourcing teams (not) do?

“…Logistic regression is robust to violations of the assumptions of other multi-variate models such as multi-variate normality and equal variance-covariance matrices across groups (Hair et al, 2010). Therefore, similar to other research of bid protests (Maser and Thompson, 2010), the model was tested using logistic regression. Results are shown in Table 4.…”

“…Additionally, the scope of this research was limited to a sourcing team's internally generated responses to threats mostly within their control. Further research could apply PMT to explore responses that might be able to protect against protests that are motivated not buy buyer error, but by supplier opportunism such as to increase revenue, harm competitors, obtain competitive intelligence, prospect for protest viability and extort a subcontract award (Maser and Thompson, 2010). Lastly, our findings indicate a fruitful area of future research between PMT and supplier-oriented purchasing (Humphreys et al, 2009).…”

“…Despite their effects on government agencies and suppliers, protests are significantly understudied quantitatively by academics. One study by Maser and Thompson (2010) found that protests are more likely in cases of: more bidders; smaller bidders; a high value of the protested contract as a percentage of the protestor's revenue; contracts with long delivery times (i.e. extended lockouts); buying services; and international winners.…”

“…Some errors can result in unfair discrimination against an offeror, and thus, lost business. Nevertheless, offerors also protest for opportunistic reasons such as to increase revenue, harm competitors, obtain competitive intelligence, prospect for protest viability and negotiate a subcontract award (Maser and Thompson, 2010).…”