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

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 and marginal cost of providing quality). We characterize the buyer's optimal buying mechanism. We then use the optimal mechanism as a...