Operations Academic Seminar

In many real-world situations where a firm outsources a project, non-cost attributes such as completion time and quality are important considerations for the firm, in addition to cost. Typically, in such settings, the non-cost attributes are observed by the firm after the project is completed.  Motivated by such a context, we consider a buyer who wishes to award 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 uncertain non-cost attribute. The uncertainty in the non-cost attribute is resolved after the project is completed and inflicts a disutility (or inconvenience) cost on the buyer. The buyer's problem is that of designing a procurement mechanism that minimizes her expected total cost.  This paper is co-authored with Shivam Gupta, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and Milind Dawande & Shouqiang Wang, University of Texas at Dallas.

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