Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

 
 
Session Overview
Session
SAT 4-2: Trust and Culture
Time:
Saturday, 06/Dec/2025:
9:40am - 10:35am


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Presentations

Valuing Ideological Customer Capital: Measurement through Procurement

Winston Dou1, Yan Ji2, David Reibstein2, Di Tian3

1University of Pennsylvania and NBER; 2HKUST, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China); 3University of Pennsylvania

A sizable amount of U.S. federal government spending is made via procurement through full and open competition. The procuring officers have a broad range of discretion in designing the contracts and selecting winners. To evaluate whether the winner of such competition is selected based on bidders' brand, sustainability, and political ideology, this paper develops and structurally estimates an auction game. Firms with hidden efficiency types and multi-dimensional characteristics participate in an auction designed by the government. We analytically characterize the optimal mechanism design to reveal the role of competition and the role of the pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors in determining procurement outcomes. By structurally estimating the model using detailed contract-level data, we show that bidders' brand, sustainability, and political ideology play significant roles in procurement and the government is willing to pay a significant premium for these attributes, though their relative importance exhibits large heterogeneity across industries.