A funny thing about observation 1 (which is sadly true) is that in the traditional economics literature on the choice for a firm to “buy” an input (hire a consultant) or “make” the input (assign a faculty committee to make recommendations) is that an *advantage* of “buy” is supposed to be “well, at least we know exactly what it will cost…
A funny thing about observation 1 (which is sadly true) is that in the traditional economics literature on the choice for a firm to “buy” an input (hire a consultant) or “make” the input (assign a faculty committee to make recommendations) is that an *advantage* of “buy” is supposed to be “well, at least we know exactly what it will cost”, whereas “make” has all sorts of hard-to-measure opportunity costs
Well, and also, you can throw the bought input into the garbage; getting rid of the made input isn't just a question of what it cost to make it but the political price of dumping it. I've had this pointed out to me in terms of why universities so rarely ask a faculty member who has specific relevant expertise to a specific technical problem for what they think, and the answer is partly, "because it's harder to tell that person that their advice is dumb or impractical."
A funny thing about observation 1 (which is sadly true) is that in the traditional economics literature on the choice for a firm to “buy” an input (hire a consultant) or “make” the input (assign a faculty committee to make recommendations) is that an *advantage* of “buy” is supposed to be “well, at least we know exactly what it will cost”, whereas “make” has all sorts of hard-to-measure opportunity costs
Well, and also, you can throw the bought input into the garbage; getting rid of the made input isn't just a question of what it cost to make it but the political price of dumping it. I've had this pointed out to me in terms of why universities so rarely ask a faculty member who has specific relevant expertise to a specific technical problem for what they think, and the answer is partly, "because it's harder to tell that person that their advice is dumb or impractical."