Abstract
Correct purchase decisions are required for the successful implementation of government procurement of public services (GPPS). Based on the limitations of decision variables in a single dimension, we consider multiple environments and propose purchasing decision variables from three dimensions: service characteristics, government capability, and environmental factors. By collecting data on decision variables from cases of government purchasing and cases of government providing services, a purchase decision model is constructed based on the random forest algorithm to help governments decide between purchasing public services and providing services. The results indicate that the decision model that considers the three dimensions has better prediction accuracy than the one that only considers service characteristics. Moreover, the results of the importance of the decision variables indicate that the financial capacity and administrative level of the government, and economic environment have a significant impact on the purchase decision of the government.
Author Contributions
All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Yuting Zhang, Lan Xu and Zhengnan Lu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yuting Zhang and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Code Availability
Not applicable
Conflicts of Interest
The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
Data Availability Statement
The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.