Examining the Relationship between the Economic Performance of Technology-Based Small Suppliers and Socially Sustainable Procurement

Youngbok Ryu and Toshiyuki Sueyoshi
Additional contact information
Youngbok Ryu: College of Professional Studies, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Toshiyuki Sueyoshi: Department of Management, New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology, 801 Leroy Place, Socorro, NM 87801, USA

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-23

Abstract: Sustainable public procurement plays an important role in addressing not only environmental but also economic and social issues through government acquisitions from technology-based small suppliers. In this context, the objective of this study is to better understand the holistic public procurement process by assessing the operational efficiency of technology-based small suppliers and associating the economic aspect of public procurement with the social aspect, such as women-owned businesses. To this end, we analyzed U.S. Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research grantees by combining network data envelopment analysis with bootstrap truncated regression analysis. Drawing on the analysis results, we found that (1) there is heterogeneity in the performance of research and development, network building, and commercialization sub-processes, and (2) there is a positive relationship between the overall performance and women-owned small suppliers who excel particularly in network building. The former implies that small suppliers may have different expertise in the chain of public procurement; the latter suggests that woman entrepreneurs with a business network may be able to outperform their counterparts in the public procurement market.

Keywords: sustainable procurement; small suppliers; data envelopment analysis; truncated regression analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7220/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7220/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:13:p:7220-:d:583718

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().