Welfare Loss In Linear Price-Preference Procurement Auctions

In government procurement auctions, discrimination in favor of one group of participants (e.g. domestic firms, minority bidders) over another group is a common practice. The optimal discriminatory rules for these auctions are typically non-linear and could be administratively complex and costly to implement. In practice, procurement auctions are usually organized as sealed-bid first-price auction with a simple percentage price-preference policy. In this paper, we analyze a model with two bidders that draw their costs from a common uniform distribution, and derive an upper bound to the welfare loss resulting from the use of linear-price preference auctions.