Split-award auctions and supply disruptions

Problem Definition: We consider a buyer that needs to source a fixed quantity. She faces several potential suppliers that might fail to deliver. The buyer conducts a procurement auction to determine contract suppliers and can choose between single-sourcing and multi-sourcing. If contract suppliers fail to deliver, the buyer tries to source from non-contract suppliers but has little bargaining power due to time pressure. Academic/Practical Relevance: The mitigation of supply risks plays an important role in procurement practice but attracted little attention in the academic analysis of procurement auctions. Academic research on multi-sourcing procurement auction typically analyzes these auctions as stand-alone events. In contrast, we investigate the influence of the auction design on the post-auction market structure and identify an effect favoring multi-sourcing. The insights provide procurement managers guidance for their sourcing decisions. Methodology: We apply game-theoretical methods to analyze a stylized model in which a cost-minimizing buyer needs to source from profit-maximizing suppliers who might fail to deliver. The buyer conducts a procurement auction to determine contract suppliers and can choose between single-sourcing and multi-sourcing. If contract suppliers fail to deliver, the buyer tries to source from a non-contract supplier. We assume that in this situation, the non-contract supplier has almost all the bargaining power. Results: First, we show that in such a setting multi-sourcing does not only reduce the supply risk but might also yield lower prices than single-sourcing. The sourcing decision affects the post-auction market structure such that being a non-contract supplier becomes less attractive in case of multi-sourcing. Second, if suppliers are heterogeneous regarding their disruption probabilities, less reliable suppliers will bid more aggressively than their more reliable competitors causing an adverse selection problem. Furthermore, we show that attracting an additional supplier can be risky as it can increase the auction price and the buyer’s total expenses. Managerial Implications: Our analysis reveals a pro-competitive effect of multi-sourcing. This effect is especially important if the buyer’s value for the item is substantially larger than suppliers’ production costs and for intermediate disruption probabilities

Contingent Payments in Procurement Interactions - Experimental Evidence

A chief objective of creating competition among suppliers is the procurement of higher quality goods at lower prices. When procuring non-standard goods, it is often difficult to write a complete specification of desired quality in the contract. A moral hazard arises when this quality is costly and determined by the supplier ex post to contracting. In an effort to mitigate this moral hazard, we introduce a correlated contingent payment contract. This contract is awarded through competitive bidding. The winning supplier’s payment is, according to a fixed probability, either the amount of their bid or a quality contingent amount that depends on the bid and an exogenous norm for how a seller and buyer split social surplus. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, there is a “Goldilocks” region for high quality to emerge in which the probability of quality contingent payment is large enough to reward high quality provision, but not too large to induce overly aggressive bidding. This optimal implementation only relies upon preferences for maximizing one’s own profit and the rationality of backward induction. A surprising experimental result is that suppliers earned positive economic profits within this region. We estimate a structural model of bounded rationality to show that risk aversion can explain this result. These results have managerial implications for the design of contingent payments in contracts

How to negotiate with dominant suppliers? A game-theory perspective from the industry

The negotiation with dominant suppliers usually drives to locked-in situation in which buyers have no choice but to accept the given conditions. Commonly found in the industry, there is a need to provide new insights to practitioners to leverage competition. Specifically, researchers apply and test concepts from Game-Theory in a real supplier selection process in the port cranes industry. Our research shows that existing literature in Game-Theory is mostly descriptive, very focused on auctions and has still limitations regarding the design, application and impact of these supplier selection concepts. Therefore, it is presented one of the first field studies presenting the application of game-trees and backward induction (tools from Game-Theory) for the design and execution of a real bargaining, including the hows and whys of our decisions. The results suggest that using Game-Theory can enhance the chance to have better negotiation outcomes by predicting the possible outcomes and prescribing the best fitting game to be design in order to increase competition among suppliers

Competition, quality and contract compliance: evidence from compulsory competitive tendering in local government in Great Britain, 1987-2000

The introduction of competition has frequently been found to cause costs to fall. There has, however, been a question as to whether this was partly achieved at the cost of quality. Auction theory predicts prices would fall more the greater the competition to provide the service. There has been some debate about whether the smaller budgets would make contract compliance more difficult. Evidence is found in support of this hypothesis. We also find some evidence that the better recorded performance of the in-house direct service organisations (DSOs) during this period was due to the information advantage they had from being incumbents

Trust and Trustworthiness in Imbalanced Markets

In this thesis, we use the methodology of experimental economics to investigate issues of trust and trustworthiness in procurement and the supply chain. First, we develop a procurement model in which both seller-side and buyer-side decisions are endogenous to the trading relationship. We investigate how a real-world contractual incentive mechanism, retainage, can be used to overcome the seller-side moral hazard problem. We find that retainage can improve trade efficiency but in-creases market prices and may deter participation. We offer managerial insights on how to design the retainage mechanism, conditional on levels of trust and trustworthiness. Second, we extend the procurement model to incorporate a contingent contract and show analytically that this contract can mitigate the seller-side moral hazard problem. We observe in a lab experiment that suppliers strategically adjust their bids with a contingent contract and that the contingent contract has unintended behavioural con-sequences, with buyers rewarding sellers less for the quality of works delivered. The results have managerial implications for the use of hierarchical elements in contracts. Third, we analyse theoretically and experimentally the horizontal effects of supply chain late payments. We show that if firms discount payment received after the standard term, then late payments feed into higher prices and reduced competition. Reneging on a standard payment term entails a penalty for the buyer set by a third-party. If this penalty is not set carefully, a welfare loss arises due to price externalities. We demonstrate how free-riding payment behaviours may emerge among financially weaker buyers in the firm population

Prizes versus contracts as incentives for innovation

Procuring an innovation involves motivating a research effort to generate a new idea and then implementing that idea efficiently. If research efforts are unveriable and implementation costs are private information, a trade-off arises between the two objectives. The optimal mechanism resolves the trade-off via two instruments: a cash prize and a follow-on contract. It primarily uses the latter, by favoring the innovator at the implementation stage when the value of the innovation is above a certain threshold and handicapping the innovator when the value of the innovation is below that threshold. A cash prize is employed as a supplementary incentive only when the value of innovation is sufficiently high. These features are consistent with current practices in the procurement of innovation and the management of unsolicited proposals

Making the most of game theory in the supplier selection process for complex items

There has been a growing interest in the application of game-theory to enhance the impact of supplier selection processes, but existing applications have been focused on commodity products. Therefore, scholars have recently called for further research into the use of game-theory to develop supplier selection processes for more complex products. The aim of this paper is to contribute by discussing the design and implementation of a novel supplier selection process based on game-theory through an empirical study of a construction project for an automotive company. The novelty of this research stems from the application of game-theory to design and implement a two-phase supplier selection process, combining a modified Japanese-auction with a structured bargaining process, and evaluating its impact in the context of complex items. Findings suggest that two-phase processes can enhance the effectiveness of the supplier selection by increasing competition and generating better predictions of the outcomes from the negotiation

All-Pay Auctions with Ties

We study the two-player, complete information all-pay auction in which a tie ensues if neither player outbids the other by more than a given amount. In the event of a tie, each player receives an identical fraction of the winning prize. Thus players engage in two margins of competition: losing versus tying, and tying versus winning. Two pertinent parameters are the margin required for victory and the value of tying relative to winning. We fully characterize the set of Nash equilibria for the entire parameter space. For much of the parameter space, there is a unique Nash equilibrium which is also symmetric. Equilibria typically involve randomizing over multiple disjoint intervals, so that in essence players randomize between attempting to tie and attempting to win. In equilibrium, expected bids and payoffs are non-monotonic in both the margin required for victory and the relative value of tying

Online Consumer Protection: an analysis of the nature and extent of online consumer protection by South African legislation

Includes bibliographical references