Transparency in Procurement: The design and use of information in trading mechanisms

这项提议的动机是需要减少公共赤字。要做到这一点，一种方法是在国家卫生服务、市议会或国防部等大型公共机构的采购中实现效率节约。我们建议通过尝试更好地将招标的一种形式的招标理论分析与实地事实相结合，为实现这一目标做出贡献。我们研究的重点是在招标过程中提供和使用信息，这是建立在最近两个方法学发展的基础上的：“信息设计”和“简单拍卖”。交易机制一直是大量研究的主题，特别是在过去的半个世纪里。最近，2000年通过同时拍卖3G移动电话牌照的巨大成功--为公共财政筹集了225亿GB，无线电频段得到了有效分配--提供了生动的证据，证明了这一理论可以多么有用。关于“拍卖”的文献集中在寻找最优的交易机制，使预期收益最大化。然而，一方面，这种优化假设投标人可以获得的信息是预先确定的。这通常是一个过于强烈的假设，因为竞标者在选择收集和披露哪些信息方面可能有很大的回旋余地。另一方面，传统上的优化使机制的复杂性及其对投标人所透露的信息的使用不受限制。这常常导致非常复杂的“最优”机制，很难在实践中实现。我们建议通过分析什么信息以及以什么形式呈现给潜在交易者，以及设计者如何利用他们所揭示的信息来确定价格和交易来扩展研究前沿。第一个新颖的想法是信息设计：具有一定目标的设计者向一组相互作用的主体提供最优信息。通过战略性地选择评标方法，并通过寻找和披露可能影响供应商成本的其他事实，设计者可以在代理人信息之间建立相互依赖；然后可以通过竞争性投标过程利用这一点，最终使设计者的目标受益。第二种想法是基于这样的观察，即由于买方的复杂目标(除价格外，质量、时间、透明度、可持续性等)，大多数实际投标是多方面的：提交的投标除价格外还包括几个不同的因素。虽然预先宣布的评分规则可以将这些出价转化为容易比较的一维分数，但它并不能消除出价的复杂性和投标人对其他出价的信念。出于实际原因，设计者需要通过简化机制来补偿这种天生的复杂性，这导致了对她可以选择的一组机制的额外限制。这些限制意味着，以前被视为次优的一系列机制现在变得重要起来。为了理解这种情况，我们分析了去中心化机制，在这种机制下，交易的条件是价格独立于竞争对手的出价。在计分拍卖的背景下，这相当于歧视性的“第一分”拍卖。根据现有的理论文献，当交易量没有事先确定时，这些拍卖并不是最优的。这两种方法结合在一起，使我们有可能加深对同时竞价和处理相互依赖的估值的现实机制等问题的理解。在这样做的同时，我们还将特别注意，不要被微观和宏观经济分析之间的人为界限所束缚，以便我们的见解能够输出到整个系统的市场，如劳动力和信贷市场。

This proposal is motivated by the need to reduce the public deficit. One way to do this is by achieving efficiency savings in procurement for large public institutions such as the National Health Service, city councils, or the Ministry of Defence. We propose to contribute towards this goal by attempting to better align the stylised theoretical analysis of tendering - a form of trading mechanism - with the facts on the ground. The focus of our study is the provision and use of information in the tendering process, building on two recent methodological developments: "Information Design" and "Simple Auctions". Trading mechanisms have been the subject of a great deal of study, especially in the last half a century. More recently, the enormously successful sale of the 3G mobile phone licences by simultaneous auctions - £22.5 billion was raised for the public purse and the band of radio frequency was efficiently assigned - in 2000, provided vivid evidence of how useful this theory can be. The literature on "auctions" is focussed on finding the optimal trading mechanism, which maximizes expected benefits. However, on the one hand, this optimization assumes that the information available to the bidders is predetermined. This is often too strong an assumption as the bid taker may have significant leeway in choosing what information to gather and disclose. On the other hand, the optimization traditionally leaves both the complexity of the mechanism and its use of the information revealed by the bidders unconstrained. This often results in very complicated "optimal" mechanisms, which are hard to implement in practice.We propose to push out the research frontier by analysing what information, and in which form, is presented to the potential traders and how information revealed by them is used by the designer to determine prices and trades.The first of these novel ideas is information design: the optimal provision of information to a group of interacting agents by a designer with a certain objective. By strategically choosing its method for scoring the bids and by seeking out and revealing additional facts that might affect the cost of suppliers, the designer can create interdependence between the agents' information; this can then be exploited through the competitive bidding process, ultimately benefiting the designer's objective. The second idea is based on the observation that due to the complex objective of the buyer (quality, timing, transparency, sustainability etc. in addition to price) most actual tenders are multi-dimensional: the bids submitted include several different factors besides price. While a pre-announced scoring rule can transform these bids into readily comparable one-dimensional scores, it does not eliminate the complexity of bids and of the bidders' beliefs about the bids of others. For practical reasons, the designer needs to compensate for this innate complication by simplifying the mechanism, resulting in additional restrictions on the set of mechanisms she can choose from. These restrictions imply that families of mechanisms previously discarded as sub-optimal, now become relevant. To capture this scenario, we analyse decentralised mechanisms, where conditional on trading, prices are independent of the bids of competitors. In the context of scoring auctions, this would correspond to a discriminatory "first-score" auction. According to the existing theoretical literature, when the quantity traded is not set beforehand, these auctions are not optimal.Together, these two approaches make it possible to advance our understanding of issues like simultaneous bidding and realistic mechanisms that deal with interdependent valuations. While doing that we will also pay particular attention not to be hemmed in by the artificial boundary between micro- and macro-economic analyses, so that our insights can be exported to system-wide markets, such as the labour and credit markets.