I will make no attempt to defend the specific recommendations I mooted. There is better work, in any case, in the academic domain on fixing our flawed civil-engineering auction processes.
The problems anyone campaigning for auction reform runs into are three-fold. One, it's a boring problem with boring solutions. Two, there are vested interests. And three, Americans suffer from a just-world bias when it comes to infrastructure [1]. The latter is apparent even in this thread. It's difficult to find solutions when people vigorously defend a clearly-flawed system.
For sure. I don't know how you overcome the inertia of our societies structure to head towards something that would likely be better for the majority of citizens. Which is a problem in many more domains that just civil works auctions.
I can see how the recommendation you mooted would improve incentives in some procurement domains. Large civil works isn't one of them however.
The problems anyone campaigning for auction reform runs into are three-fold. One, it's a boring problem with boring solutions. Two, there are vested interests. And three, Americans suffer from a just-world bias when it comes to infrastructure [1]. The latter is apparent even in this thread. It's difficult to find solutions when people vigorously defend a clearly-flawed system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis