To stay on top of global competition, firms and governments often need to acquire innovative goods and services, including ideas and research, from their strategic suppliers. A careful design of procurement policy is crucial to make potential suppliers generate and sell the most suitable...

This paper considers the problem of identification and estimation in the first-price multi-unit auction. It is motivated by the auctions of bus routes held in London where bidders submit bids on combinations of routes as well as on individual routes. We show that submitting a combination bid...

We compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly: a simple simultaneous auction, and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether or not to enter the bidding. The sequential process is always more efficient. But...

A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost + marginal cost of providing quality). We solve for the optimal buying mechanism, i.e. the procedure that maximizes the buyer’s expected...

This Paper studies scoring auctions, a procedure commonly used to buy differentiated products: suppliers submit offers on all dimensions of the good (price, level of non monetary attributes), and these are evaluated using a scoring rule. We provide a systematic analysis of equilibrium behaviour...

A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost + marginal cost of providing quality). We solve for the optimal buying procedure, i.e. the procedure that maximizes the buyer's expected...