Contracting with Qualified Suppliers
扩展了Laffont-Tirole模型，分析买方事前认证供应商、事后选择最有效率者生产的机制，发现买方对成本的不完全信息会导致事前市场结构偏向更多合格供应商，并探讨了产品差异化和干中学对拆分生产订单和供应商资格不完全的影响。
In an extension of the Laffont-Tirole model, a buyer fully qualifies a set of suppliers ex ante and awards production to the most efficient ex post. The buyer's incomplete information about production costs biases ex ante market structure in favor of a greater number of qualified suppliers. Further extensions that allow product differentiation and learning-by-doing suggest explanations for split production awards and less than fully qualified suppliers. it may be difficult to specify ex ante precisely how the assets will be employed in production (Grossman and Hart 1986). Once relationship-specific assets are in place, the characteristics of the transaction and the gains from trade will be determined by ex post contracting between the buyer and the seller. A safeguard for the buyer is to contract with more than one potential supplier to invest in the relationship-specific assets required for production. Then, after production require- ments become clear, the buyer can structure a competition between these suppliers for the right to produce. This article analyzes when a second-sourcing is desirable, and how the buyer should structure it. Asanuma's (1989) description of the two-vendor policy of automobile manufac- turers in Japan provides a context for the analysis. Japanese automobile manufac- turers contract out for various kinds of components, for example, headlamps, brakes, or steering columns. The common practice is to purchase each component from a small, and relatively stable, group of qualified suppliers, with the purposes of assuring supply and of creating competition. Moreover, for a particular part for a particular model, there is a tendency for an automobile manufacturer to purchase' from a single supplier in the group for the life of the model. My understanding from interviews and the trade press is that U.S. automobile manufacturers also sole source from a select group of qualified suppliers, but with