The corruption of nominating a supplier or a design as the only approved design is equivalent to not using price as information - or rather, not being allowed t

The corruption of nominating a supplier or a design as the only approved design is equivalent to not using price as information - or rather, not being allowed to use price as information. For example, if a supplier is inefficient in a free market, then the prices they charge are significantly higher than the inputs - i.e. profit is high. High profits attract competition; competitors look at the price of the output and the prices of the input and see that they can do better by building something cheaper. This competition drives efficiency and reduces prices. Whether competition is banned, or improvements are banned, or prices are exogenously set, it's all approximately equivalent to mucking with price as information.