In procurement auctions, bidders are usually better informed about technical, financial, or legal aspects of the goods and services procured. Therefore, the buyer may include a dialogue in the procurement procedure which enables the suppliers to reveal information that will help the buyer to better specify the terms of the contract. This paper addresses the question of the value added of letting the sourcing process consist of both an auction and a negotiation stage, theoretically and in a laboratory experiment. Our theoretical results suggest that in a setting where the buyer and the suppliers have aligned interests regarding the terms of the contract, allowing the winning supplier to communicate with the buyer after the auction is beneficial to the buyer compared to no communication and ex-ante communication. In a setting where the buyer and the winning supplier have misaligned interests regarding the terms, the buyer benefits from ex-ante communication relative to no communication and ex-post communication. Our experimental data provide strong evidence for the predictions in the aligned-interest setting. In the misaligned-interest setting, we do not observe significant differences between the three mechanisms. Our experimental findings offer several managerial implications for the appropriate design of sourcing processes. a We received excellent questions, comments, and suggestions from "Even for rather simple contracts […] the purchaser is seldom interested solely in price -he is interested in acquiring and providing information as well." Victor P. Goldberg (1977) 1 Beall et al. (2003) report that companies in the US and Europe expected to spend about 11.5% of total expenditure using electronic reverse auctions. OECD (2018) reports that the amount spent in OECD countries on public procurement is about 12% of GDP. 2 Another purpose of request-of-information rounds is to weed out unqualified suppliers (e.g., Elmaghraby, 2007). show that an auctioneer can alleviate winner's curse problems by soliciting non-binding bids before the auction. However, observe in an experiment that bidders tend to coordinate on a "babbling equilibrium" in which no information is revealed. Another reason for soliciting non-binding bids is to enhance efficient entry into the auction when auction entry is costly. See Ye (2007) and Quint and Hendricks (2018) for a theoretical analysis and Kagel et al. (2008) for a laboratory study. 3 Other reasons for the buyer to allow for post-auction communication include price renegotiations (e.g., Shachat and Tan, 2014), and contingencies arising which are not specified in the original contract resulting in cost overruns (e.g., Herweg and Schwarz, 2018). 4 Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement. communication reveal useful information for the buyer? Under what conditions does the buyer benefit from non-binding communication from the suppliers, before or after the auction? Under what conditions does the buyer prefer pre-auction communication over post-auction communication and the other way aro...