Procurement under public scrutiny: auctions versus negotiations
研究了公共采购中拍卖和谈判两种机制，发现不透明的谈判比透明的拍卖能带来更高的社会剩余，且在卖家数量足够多时还能提高买方剩余。
We compare two commonly used mechanisms in public procurement: auctions and negotiations. The execution of the procurement mechanism is delegated to an agent of the buyer. The agent has private information about the buyer's preferences and may collude with one of the sellers. We provide a general characterization of both mechanisms based on public scrutiny requirements and show—contrary to conventional wisdom—that an intransparent negotiation always yields higher social surplus than a transparent auction. Moreover, there exists a lower bound on the number of sellers such that the negotiation also generates a higher buyer surplus.