Descending mechanisms for procurement (or, ascending mechanisms for selling) have been well‐recognized for their simplicity from the viewpoint of bidders — they require less bidder sophistication as compared to sealed‐bid mechanisms. In this study, we consider procurement under each of two...

A buyer faces a two-dimensional mechanism design problem for awarding a project to one among a set of contractors, each of whom is privately informed about his cost and his estimate of an a priori random non-cost attribute. The winning contractor realizes his non-cost attribute upon the...

Business to business interactions are largely centered around contracts for procurement or for distribution. Negotiations and sealed bid tendering are the most common techniques used for price discovery and generating the terms and conditions for contracts. Sealed bid tenders collect bids (that...

Consider the following "structured" procurement problem: A buyer wishes to procure a set of items (e.g., edges of a graph) from multiple suppliers, such that the procured items collectively form a basis of a matroid (e.g., a spanning tree of the graph). Each supplier is capable of supplying one...