Sourcing through auctions and audits

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chen, Ying-Ju; Seshadri, Sridhar; Zemel, Eitan
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley; New York University
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.3401/poms.1080.0018
• 发表日期: 2008
• 页码: 121-138
• 关键词: Procurement auction; auditing; information asymmetry; supply chain coordination

摘要

Buyers often find that obtaining complete information about suppliers is costly. In such scenarios, there is a trade-off between the costs of obtaining information and the benefits that accrue to the owners of such information. There are also various ways in which the missing information can be obtained or inferred. In this paper, we compare the efficiency of obtaining information via the classical mechanism design approach, which relies on the information available before the contracts are designed, with that of an audit-based approach, which relies on the information obtained after the fact. In our model, a single buyer (the Stackelberg leader) wishes to procure a package of products or services from various competing suppliers that possess private cost information. We allow for arbitrary cost and revenue functions and can incorporate multiple cost and revenue drivers. We show how the buyer can optimize her profit and at the same time coordinate the channel by using a contract scheme involving auctions, audits, and profit sharing. We also examine the behavior of this mechanism when the supplier can exert effort to reduce cost but the cost of effort cannot be verified. We propose several mechanisms for different precontract informational scenarios and compare their performance.