A buyer seeks to procure a service and solicits bids from sellers. The cost of the service depends on characteristics that are only known to the buyer (“common values”). The buyer can choose how many bids to solicit and the number of solicited bids cannot be disclosed verifiably. We characterize equilibrium. We show that there are potentially important differences between a standard common valu...

The standard monopoly pricing problem is re-considered when the buyer can disclose his type (e.g. age, income, experience) at some cost. In the optimal sales mechanism with costly disclosure, the seller posts a price list, including a “sticker price” available to any buyer and a schedule of discounts available to those who disclose certain types. Unambiguous welfare implications of such a prici...

I analyze how a buyer optimally contracts with a seller who is privately informed about his information structure, i.e., his ability of acquiring private signals containing imperfect cost information. I demonstrate that the seller ranks information structures according to the order of their signal distributions in the sense of second order stochastic dominance. Optimal contracts offer sellers w...

In a dynamic storable good market where demand changes over time, we investigate the producer’s strategic incentives to hold inventories in response to the possibility of buyer stockpiling. The literature on storable goods has demonstrated that buyer stockpiling in anticipation of higher future prices harms the producer’s profitability, particularly when the producer cannot commit to future pri...

This paper presents supplier-buyer models to describe the bargaining process between a supplier and a buyer over a long-term replenishment contract in a supply chain system. We develop two different models, one for the situation where the supplier has a superior bargaining power over the buyer and the other for the reverse situation. Analysis based on a game theoretic approach is done to derive...

The logic of the linkage principle of Milgrom and Weber (1982) extends to price discrimination. A non-linear pricing monopolist who sells to a single buyer always prefers to commit to publicly reveal information affiliated to the valuation of the buyer.