Designing Supply Contracts: Contract Type and Information Asymmetry
研究供应商在了解买方成本结构以及提供更灵活合同时的价值，分析六种场景下最优合同和利润，发现信息价值在两部分合同中更高，而提供两部分合同的价值在完全信息下更高。
This paper studies the value to a supplier of obtaining better information about a buyer's cost structure, and of being able to offer more general contracts. We use the bilateral monopoly setting to analyze six scenarios: three increasingly general contracts (wholesale-pricing schemes, two-part linear schemes, and twopart nonlinear schemes), each under full and incomplete information about the buyer's cost structure. We allow both sides to refuse to trade by explicitly including reservation profit levels for both; for the supplier, this is implemented through a cutoff policy. We derive the supplier's optimal contracts and profits for all six scenarios and examine the value of information and of more general contracts. Our key findings are as follows: First, the value of information is higher under two-part contracts; second, the value of offering two-part contracts is higher under full information; and third, the proportion of buyers the supplier will choose to exclude can be substantial.