Simple Contracts to Assure Supply Under Noncontractible Capacity and Asymmetric Cost Information
研究了买方在供应商成本信息不对称且产能投资不可签约时，如何用简单合同（如线性合同或两部定价）确保供应，发现简单合同在多数情况下能接近最优利润，解释了实践中简单合同普遍存在的原因。
This paper studies a global sourcing problem where a buyer sources a product from a supplier to satisfy uncertain market demand. With the increasing length and complexity of today’s global supply chains, the buyer may face two issues when designing the sourcing contract: adverse selection (i.e., the supplier’s cost structure is private information) and noncontractible capacity (i.e., the supplier’s capacity investment is not contractible). We show that noncontractible capacity does not necessarily lead to a lower profit for the buyer, but it may require a more complex contract format to achieve the optimal (second-best) profit. Interestingly, we find that a single, linear contract (or a two-part tariff) could be optimal for the buyer under certain conditions. Even when such a contract is suboptimal, it can deliver close-to-optimal profit for the buyer for a wide range of situations. These findings indicate that the value of using a complex menu of contracts is negligible in such a supply chain setting. A simple two-part tariff is an attractive option for buyers whose goal is to ensure supply while facing both cost uncertainty and contractibility issues. The paper also provides a new explanation for the prevalence of such simple contracts in practice. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0628 .