An Empirical Investigation of Procurement Contract Structures
建立了一个成本信息不对称下的采购合同模型，并用加州医疗补助计划与医院的实际合同数据检验了模型的两个预测：是否存在固定价格支付区间，以及该区间大小是否取决于对医院成本的预期。
This article presents a model of procurement contracting with asymmetric cost information and investigates whether two of the model's predictions are consistent with actual contracts between hospitals and California's Medicaid program. The article first tests for the presence of a fixed-price payment region where Medicaid's payments are independent of hospitals' actual (but unobservable) production costs and then tests whether the size of the fixed-price region depends upon expectations about hospitals' costs. To conduct these tests, the article must first estimate hospitals' "unobservable" costs attributable to Medicaid patients. The article finds evidence of a fixed-price region but cannot confirm that the size of the fixed-price region depends upon expectations about hospitals' costs.