Events

Dr. Ningzhong Li
Associate Professor of Accounting
Jindal School of Management
University of Texas at Dallas

We argue that contracting with the federal government involves significant proprietary information cost due to regulations requiring contractors to provide proprietary information, which may become available to outsiders via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. We provide evidence by showing that firms become more willing to bid for government contracts after a recent Supreme Court ruling on FOIA (Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media) that improves information protection for contractors, and the effect is stronger when the contracts incur higher proprietary information cost for contractors.