Prizes and lemons: procurement of innovation under imperfect commitment
研究了采购方无法承诺不与绕过竞赛的创新者讨价还价时，固定奖金竞赛与最优评分拍卖在创新采购中的表现，发现防止绕过在拍卖中成本更高，且最优固定奖金竞赛比最优拍卖更有利可图。
The literature on research and development contests implicitly assumes that contestants submit their innovation regardless of its value. This ignores a potential adverse selection problem. The present article analyzes the procurement of innovations when the procurer cannot commit himself to never bargain with innovators who bypass the contest. We compare fixed‐prize tournaments with and without entry fees, and optimal scoring auctions with and without minimum score requirement. Our main result is that preventing bypass is more costly in the optimal auction, and the optimal fixed‐prize tournament is more profitable than the optimal auction.