Procurement when price and quality matter
研究买方在供应商有私人成本信息时，如何设计最优采购程序以最大化期望效用，并比较评分拍卖和谈判等简单程序的效果。
A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost + marginal cost of providing quality). We solve for the optimal buying procedure, i.e. the procedure that maximizes the buyer’s expected utility. We then use the optimal procedure as a theoretical and numerical benchmark to study practical and simple buying procedures such as scoring auctions and negotiation. We find that scoring auctions are able to extract a good proportion of the surplus from being a strategic buyer − that is, the difference between the expected revenue from the optimal mechanism and the efficient auction. Sequential procedures (to which many negotiation processes belong) do less well and, in fact, often do worse than simply holding an efficient auction.