Essays on Procurement, Scoring Auction, and Quality Manipulation Corruption

Abstract

This dissertation studies the procurement problem with focus on the issue of quality. Most target items of procurement are not standardized goods, but are some customized goods with quality measured by non-monetary attributes. Scoring auction is one of the most popular procurement schemes used in practice. In a scoring auction, each supplying firm chooses its bid as a combination of price and quality attributes according to a pre-announced scoring rule. The scoring rule ranks all submitted multi-dimensional bids and award the contract to the firm with highest score. To implement a scoring auction, quality assessment is necessary, but the buyer usually does not possess the relevant industrial expertise. So the buyer has to hire an intermediary agent and the problem of quality manipulation arises when the quality reports of bids are distorted by the agent. In particular, the agent may exaggerate the corrupted firm's quality score in exchange for bribe. Chapter 1 provides an theoretical analysis on the optimal procurement scheme design problem under quality manipulation. Chapter 2 is an empirical study on scoring auctions. Chapter 3 shows how we can statistically test quality manipulation from scoring auction data.