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Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events.

Please check our website listings and social media feeds @STICERD_LSE at X and @LSE-STICERD-CASE at Bluesky for updates.

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Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.

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About this event

We study optimal procurement when a Bayesian designer must obtain approval from a non-Bayesian authority that shares the designer?s objective but is uncertain about the value of the good and the supplier?s cost. The designer uses a conjectured model to compute expected payoffs but is constrained to select among mechanisms delivering the largest payoff guarantee to the authority. This robustness requirement reshapes the tradeoff between efficiency and rent extraction: it reduces procurement from sellers with intermediate costs but may increase it from those with a high cost. When the good is sold in a market, we show that quantity regulation dominates price regulation if markups under the conjectured model are large, whereas price regulation dominates when demand uncertainty is substantial.