The relationship between a buyer and its suppliers is important and often relies on factors beyond the terms of a contractual agreement. Buyers can therefore benefit from identifying trustworthy suppliers. We argue that pre-contractual actions by the supplier, for example making costly...

We study the design of sequential procurement strategies that integrate stochastic and strategic information. We consider a buyer who repeatedly demands a certain good and is unable to commit to long-term contracts. In each time period, the buyer makes a price offer to a seller who has private,...