Paralysis of Discretion: Institutional Pressure and the Failure of Value-Based Procurement in Thai Public Administration

Why does a policy that formally authorises public officials to weigh quality alongside price so often fail to change what those officials actually do? This paper develops "paralysis of discretion" as an outcome construct denoting the systematic avoidance of legally available discretion by public procurement officers operating under intense audit scrutiny. Rather than treating this as a restatement of blame avoidance, risk aversion, or institutional decoupling, the paper proposes a micro-level mechanism — audit pressure, anticipated accountability cost, asymmetric justification cost, and discretion avoidance — that explains why procedurally defensible, lowest-price choices remain individually rational even for officers with no corrupt intent, and shows how the aggregation of such choices across an organisation produces policy–practice decoupling as a macro-level outcome. Drawing on institutional theory, blame-avoidance theory, street-level bureaucracy, and transaction cost economics, and illustrated with documentary evidence from Thailand's public procurement of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, the paper positions itself explicitly as a conceptual and theory-building contribution rather than an empirical test, and closes with a set of testable propositions and a documented boundary condition under which discretion avoidance is expected to weaken. Status: Conceptual/theory-building contribution, not yet peer-reviewed. Comments and feedback welcome.