Information Elicitation and Influenza Vaccine Production
研究了政府如何设计最优合同来采购流感疫苗，以应对供应商的产量不确定性、私人生产率信息和不可验证的生产努力，并发现当努力可验证时可消除信息租金。
We explore the procurement of influenza vaccines by a government whose objective is to minimize the expected social costs (including vaccine, vaccine administration, and influenza treatment costs) when a for-profit vaccine supplier has production yield uncertainty, private information about its productivity (adverse selection), and potentially unverifiable production effort (moral hazard). Timeliness is important—costs for both the supplier and the government procurer may increase if part of the vaccine order is delivered after a scheduled delivery date. We theoretically derive the optimal menu of output-based contracts. Next, we present a menu that is optimal within a more restricted set of practically implementable contracts, and numerically show that such a menu leads to near-optimal outcomes. Finally, we present a novel way to eliminate that information rent if the manufacturer’s effort is also verifiable, a counterintuitive result because the manufacturer has private productivity information. This provides an upper bound for the government on how much it should spend to monitor the manufacturer’s effort.