I do not understand the reference to Arrow's Paradox in a discussion of procurement policy (almost certainly related to my lack of knowledge). Can you elaborate?
Sure --- there's a neat paper by Franssen (2006) that demonstrates the formal equivalence between optimization problems and the social policy problems Arrow was concerned with. Basically, Arrow says that some constituents will always lose out under any social policy. Franssen showed that you can swap out "composite cost metric" for social policy and "components of the cost metric" for constituents, and the same arguments apply.
Here's the full citation. Turns out I misremembered the year (2005).
Franssen M (2005) Arrow’s theorem, multi-criteria decision problems and multi-attribute preferences in engineering design. Research in Engineering Design 16(1):42–56
