Entry and Bidding in Common and Private Value Auctions with an Unknown Number of Rivals

In many procurement auctions bidders do not know how many rivals they face at the time that they incur the cost of preparing their bids. We show in a theoretical model that regardless of whether the procurement is characterized by private or by common values an increase in the potential number of bidders may lead to higher procurement costs. This raises potential policy questions of whether and how entry should be encouraged or limited in public procurement auctions. We use evidence from auctions of construction contracts to estimate the effect of an increase in the pool of potential bidders on entry and auction prices when entry and bidding decisions are made sequentially with no knowledge of the number or identity of the actual competitors.     

On the competition enhancing effects of exclusive dealing contracts

Antitrust scholars have argued that exclusive contracts have anticompetitive, or at best neutral effects, if no efficiencies are generated. In contrast, this paper shows that exclusive contracts can have procompetitive effects, provided buyers are imperfect downstream competitors and contract breach is feasible. In that case, an efficient entrant is not necessarily foreclosed through exclusive contracts but induces buyers to breach. Because breaching buyers have to pay expectation damages to the incumbent, the downstream profits they obtain when breaching must be large enough. Therefore, the entrant needs to set a lower wholesale price than absent exclusive contracts, leading to lower final consumer prices and higher welfare.     

USING RESERVE PRICES TO DETER COLLUSION IN PROCUREMENT COMPETITION*

To enhance our understanding of collusion in procurement settings, this paper quantitatively evaluates how the buyer's choice of a reserve price influences the sustainability of two previously devised collusive schemes. If the buyer does not select its reserve price strategically, then collusion may be sustainable for a wide range of plausible discount factors. However, even mildly sophisticated reserve price selection can dramatically shrink the set of discount factors for which collusion is sustainable. These findings support existing arguments that buyers are vulnerable to collusion, but they also suggest that buyers possess tools that may profitably induce sellers to act competitively.     

Corruption in PPPs,incentives and contract incompleteness

We analyze risk allocation and contractual choices when public procurement is plagued with moral hazard, private information on exogenous shocks, and threat of corruption. Complete contracts entail state-contingent clauses that compensate the contractor for shocks unrelated to his own effort. By improving insurance, those contracts reduce the agency cost of moral hazard. When the contractor has private information on revenues shocks, verifying messages on shocks realizations is costly. Incomplete contracts do not specify state-contingent clauses, thereby saving on verifiability costs. This makes incomplete contracts attractive even though they entail greater agency costs. Because of private information on contracting costs, a public official may have discretion to choose whether to procure under a complete or an incomplete contract. When the public official is corrupt, such delegation results in incomplete contracts being chosen too often. Empirical predictions on the use of incomplete contracts and policy implications on the benefits of standardized contracts are discussed.     

Collusion through Coordination of Announcements

A theory is developed to explain how sellers can effectively collude by coordinating on list prices (or surcharges), while leaving sellers to set their final prices. List prices are interpreted to be cheap talk announcements about cost information unknown to buyers. Buyers use those announcements to decide whom to invite to their procurement auction and the reserve price to set. By coordinating on a high list price to signal high cost, sellers produce supracompetitive prices by inducing buyers to be less aggressive, as reflected in a higher reserve price. We show that collusion can raise social welfare.     

Contracts as a barrier to entry: Impact of Buyer’s asymmetric information and bargaining power

An incumbent seller contracts with a buyer under the threat of entry. The contract stipulates a price and a penalty for breach if the buyer later switches to the entrant. Sellers are heterogenous in terms of the gross surplus they provide to the buyer. The buyer is privately informed on her valuation for the incumbent’s service. Asymmetric information makes the incumbent favor entry as it helps screening buyers. When the entrant has some bargaining power vis-à-vis the buyer and keeps a share of the gains from entry, the incumbent instead wants to reduce entry. The compounding effect of these two forces may lead to either excessive entry or foreclosure, and possibly to a fixed rebate for exclusivity which is afforded to all buyers.     

The Price Effects of Using Firewalls as an Antitrust Remedy

Antitrust authorities have imposed firewalls between the previously separate divisions of newly vertically integrated firms in several industries, to address concerns that access to horizontal rivals’ proprietary information may reduce competition. This paper evaluates a specific antitrust concern by modeling the price effect of one seller’s learning its rival’s production costs before bidding in a duopoly procurement contest. The results show that imposing a firewall as a condition for permitting a vertical merger actually can lead to higher prices than if the flow of information were unimpeded, and they provide guidance as to when this unintended outcome occurs.     

Auction Platform Design and the Linkage Principle

This paper examines an auction platform in which the monopoly platform maximizes profits by adjusting participation fees and choosing an auction format. The seller has private information on the quality of the good, and each participating buyer receives a private signal about his valuation of the good. The choice of auction format determines the allocation of trading surplus between the seller and buyers. This paper shows that when the seller's type is affiliated with the buyers' signals, the platform can charge higher participation fees on both sides by choosing a first‐price or descending auction than a second‐price or ascending auction.     

Reverse Price Discrimination with Bayesian Buyers

This paper studies price discrimination under the situation in which buyers' prior valuations are initially observable by a seller but buyers receive further information about a product or service which remains private thereafter. The buyers interpret new information via Bayes' rule. We show that, in this environment, prices are not monotone in buyers' prior valuations. Interestingly, this results in the possibility that a seller intentionally offers a higher price to a low valuation buyer rather than a high valuation buyer (Reverse Price Discrimination). We derive this result in both monopoly and duopoly markets.     

CUT‐THROAT FRINGE COMPETITION IN AN EMERGING COUNTRY MARKET: TAX EVASION OR THE ABSENCE OF MARKET POWER?*

Brazil's established soft‐drink firms recently lost ground to multiple low‐price entrants, with small‐scale operations and minimal advertising. While incumbents attributed such undercutting to entrants' lower costs from non‐compliance with the law, ‘generics’ counterargued that incumbents' high prices stemmed from unilateral market power rather than cost heterogeneity. By estimating a structural model, I can single‐handedly explain established brands' high prices through low equilibrium price elasticities of demand. Tax evasion in the fringe, while plausible, appears to be offset by higher procurement costs or less efficient scale. More generally, a competitive informal sector can alleviate the allocative distortions in certain concentrated industries.     

Controlling Sellers Who Provide Advice: Regulation and Competition*

A monopoly seller advising buyers about which of two goods fits their needs may be tempted to recommend the higher margin good. For the seller to collect information about a buyer’s needs and provide truthful advice, the profits from selling both goods must be similar enough, i.e., within an implementability cone. The optimal regulation controls pricing distortions and information-collection incentives separately via price regulation and fixed rewards respectively. This no longer holds when the seller has private information about costs as both problems interact. We study whether competition and the threat by buyers to switch sellers can substitute for regulation.     

Relationship quality as a resource to build industrial brand equity when products are uncertain and future-based

This article extends our understanding of industrial branding and the influence of buyer–seller relationships by examining key constructs within an industrial context where products are uncertain and future-based. SEM results elicited from 249 buyer surveys empirically validate satisfaction, trust and commitment as dimensions of relationship quality, and show that buyer–seller relationship quality facilitates direct and indirect seller brand equity accruals. Findings reveal that while focusing on sellers' corporate and product brands is good advice for building buyer–seller relationships, seller resource allocations to these areas should vary depending upon the selected target market segment(s). Findings support that sellers should place more focus on developing quality relationships with buyers than they should in focusing on the non-relational attributes of their corporate brands; however, if sellers choose to bypass building high quality customer relationships, they should instead funnel resources into their product brand offerings. Findings demonstrate that buyers credit their own skills and acumen when evaluating products with which they are confident, and ascribe increased value to the involvement of the seller as their attitude and certainty decrease. These findings provide strategic guidance to the sellers of uncertain and future-based industrial products.     

Exclusion through speculation

We demonstrate how an incumbent producer of commodities can use cash-settled derivatives contracts to deter entry and extract rents from a potential competitor. By selling more derivatives than total demand, the producer commits to low prices and forces the entrant to price low upon entry. By setting a high upfront derivatives price, the producer can extract the consumer's gains from those low prices. This exclusionary scheme becomes more difficult when the buyer becomes more risk averse and with multiple buyers.     

“The more,the merrier” or “less is more”? How the number of issues addressed in B2B sales negotiations affects dyadic and seller economic outcomes

With a mixed-methods approach, this study analyzes how varying the number of issues in business-to-business (B2B) sales negotiations affects negotiation processes and outcomes. A qualitative interview study with B2B negotiators (N = 46) reveals that more issues increase complexity but offer more possibilities for concessions. Sellers see benefits in increasing the number of issues addressed, whereas buyers are ambiguous about whether negotiating more issues will benefit their economic outcomes. A second experimental study (N = 97 dyads) tests whether negotiating a different number of issues (four, eight, or between four and eight) produces different absolute and relative dyadic economic outcomes and sellers' shares of the joint profits in one-on-one negotiations. In absolute terms, more negotiation issues produce larger negotiation pies; fewer issues facilitate more accurate information processing, leading to relatively more integrative agreements. For sellers, increasing the number of issues increases their share of the joint profit, because buyers are more willing to concede on the overall price of the deal.     

Platform Price Parity Clauses and Consumer Obfuscation*

Several antitrust authorities have investigated platform price parity clauses around the world. I analyze the impact of these clauses when platforms design a search environment for sellers and buyers to interact. In a model where platforms choose the unit search cost faced by consumers, I show when platforms can profitably obfuscate consumers through high search costs. Then, I show that price parity clauses, when exogenously given, can increase or reduce obfuscation, prices, and consumer surplus. Finally, when price parity clauses are endogenous, they are only observed in equilibrium if they hurt consumers.     

Modeling the effects of mergers in procurement

In procurement settings, mergers among suppliers reduce buyers' choice sets and can harm buyers by eliminating their preferred supplier or reducing their negotiating leverage. I develop a stochastic economic model that predicts the effects of mergers based on information that commonly is available to antitrust authorities. I derive general expressions for the ex ante expected changes in price, buyer utility, and supplier profit. Each becomes tractable under certain distributional assumptions. The model predicts that average prices will increase by more than 40% due to the recently litigated acquisition of Power Reviews by Bazaarvoice, in the absence of an effective remedy.     

Price discrimination on booking time

Even if consumers are forward looking and free to choose when to purchase, a firm can price discriminate on booking time if consumers learn their valuations at different times and consumers who learn later have higher valuations. The model is related to our work on optimal screening with returns contracts Akan, Ata, and Dana [1], but here we consider a simpler binary-valuation distribution and consider more realistic consumer learning assumptions. The main contribution is to show that the profitability of screening on time is robust to relaxing the assumption that consumers learn instantaneously. In addition to analyzing a bad-news model in which information arrives gradually, we characterize a general bound on consumer optimism that guarantees that the instantaneous learning results are robust.     

Hassle Costs, Price-Matching Guarantees and Price Competition: An Experiment

We experimentally investigate whether the collusion-facilitating nature of price-matching guarantees survives the introduction of hassle costs incurred by buyers to enforce these guarantees. The presence of an arbitrarily small number of positive hassle costs buyers may completely undermine incentives for collusion. To evaluate this possibility, we develop four one-shot price competition models that test the hassle cost argument by varying proportions of positive and zero hassle cost buyers present in the market. Although the theory predicts that the competitive price should emerge in equilibrium in all four models, we experimentally find significant price differences.     

Price authority and information sharing with competing supply chains

We characterize the degree of price discretion that two competing manufacturers grant their retailers in a framework where demand is uncertain and privately observed by the retailers, while manufacturers only learn it probabilistically. In contrast with the consolidated vertical contracting literature, we assume that manufacturers cannot use monetary incentives to align the retailers’ incentives to pass on their unverifiable distribution costs to consumers. Our objective is to study how, in this context, an information-sharing agreement according to which manufacturers share their demand information affects prices, profits and consumer surplus. While equilibria with full price delegation never exist, regardless of whether manufacturers share information, partial delegation equilibria may exist with and without the exchange of information. These equilibria feature binding price caps (list prices) that prevent retailers from passing on their distribution costs to consumers, and are more likely to occur when manufacturers exchange demand information than when they do not share this information. Manufacturers profit from exchanging demand information when products are sufficiently differentiated, and retailers’ distribution costs are high enough. Yet, expected prices are unambiguously lower when manufacturers exchange demand information than when they don’t, making the information exchange beneficial to consumers.     

Asymmetric Cost Pass-Through in Multi-Unit Procurement Auctions: An Experimental Approach*

We explore input cost pass-through in multi-unit procurement auctions. Whether cost shocks are private versus common across firms has important implications for discriminatory, but not uniform price auctions. We provide evidence of asymmetric pass-through of private cost shocks in discriminatory auctions. Unlike uniform price auctions, revenue-maximizing bidders in discriminatory auctions ‘pad’ bids close to the expected clearing price for units with costs below that price, but they do not bid below cost on higher cost units. Therefore, if costs are higher than expected, the clearing price rises and if costs are lower than expected, the clearing price remains high.