Partnerships in UK Defense Procurement Available to Purchase

Since the 1998 Strategic Defense Review, the UK Government reversed its competition policy and now seeks to improve defense procurement relationships with industry through partnering. However, at a time when the defense industries are concentrating and globalizing and more and more of the large contracts are being managed under monopoly conditions, substantive relationship improvements are hard to find. The author's propose that a Transaction Cost Economics Market Failure model provides insights into solving the defense procurement problem by focusing the combination of supply chain factors, which result in successful partnerships within a sustained monopoly. The results of a pilot project justify the approach and suggest that the main program will both extend knowledge in an area that has received little attention by management researchers and also offer practical guidance to managers.