Information Elicitation and Influenza Vaccine Production

Abstract

We explore the procurement of influenza vaccines by a government whose objective is to minimize the expected social costs (including vaccine, vaccine administration, and influenza treatment costs) when a for-profit vaccine supplier has production yield uncertainty, private information about its productivity (adverse selection) and potentially unverifiable production effort (moral hazard). Timeliness is important – costs for both the supplier and the government procurer may increase if part of the vaccine order is delivered after a scheduled delivery date. We theoretically derive the optimal menu of output-based contracts to minimize information rent, and numerically identify key drivers of that information rent. We also present a novel way to eliminate that information rent if the manufacturer’s effort is also verifiable, a counter intuitive result because the manufacturer has private productivity information. This provides an upper bound on how much a government should spend to monitor the manufacturer’s effort.