This strikes me as a classic separation of buyer interests from vendor interests leading to misaligned incentives. The contractors have no incentive to update their equipment. In fact if this is scientifically proven to be a major solution they should want to avoid this. If the province could incentivize the vendor to pay them more for every year there is no pothole and punish them for every pothole they would totall…
I would argue that lack of adoption is likely a discovery and design problem rather than an economic one. In a free market other people can choose to enter into the contracting business. If I have a leg up on my competition (paving better roads for the same cost) I will eventually out compete people who fail to adapt to the new method. This doesn't happen immediately, but you can't fool everyone forever if there trul…
This doesn’t really work for government contractors because the government isn’t even remotely a rational buyer. The government doesn’t generally have the latitude to pick the best value - they are constrained by procedural rules. For example, in the US, 5% of federal small contractor spending must go to minority-owned businesses, regardless of their relative quality. Generally there is a fixed bidding procedure that doesn’t allow for judgements about the quality of the final product. Where the government isn’t constrained by procedural rules, politics will come before rational spending. This argument only really works for privately owned and operated roads that have rational incentives.
