基于价格歧视策略的多单元逆向多属性英式拍卖机制

针对现有的多单元逆向多属性拍卖机制的市场分配效率都比较低,不利于社会效益最大化和采购双方长期合作等问题,设计了高效率的基于价格歧视策略的多单元逆向多属性英式拍卖机制,利用线性混合整数规划建立了赢者确定模型,并基于新建立的拍卖机制给出了拍卖流程和投标策略,为供应商提供投标决策支持。然后通过设计数值实例和对比模拟实验收集数据,采取统计分析的方法验证了新设计的拍卖机制市场分配效率和采购方的效益都比较高。上述研究结果适用于通过逆向多属性拍卖与信息技术相结合的网上自动化多单元商品采购。     

两种记分函数下多属性拍卖投标均衡策略

以拍卖人期望收益最大化为机制设计目标,讨论两种不同偏好的记分函数条件下,最高得分密封投标拍卖和连续完全信息多属性英式拍卖中,卖者的最优投标策略和买者的最优拍卖设计问题,主要结论是:1)无论选择哪种拍卖方式和记分函数,拍卖人均有动机隐瞒自己的真实偏好,除非竞价人是同质的或参与人数足够多.2)竞价人最优属性策略qi*与拍卖...     

Home-grown values and incentive compatible auction design

The behavioral properties of several auctions designed to elicit individual valuations for an object are studied using controlled laboratory experiments. Our experiments lead us to conclude that there are some behavioral differences between alternative incentive-compatible institutions for eliciting home-grown values, contrary to the theoretical expectation that these institutions are isomorphic. These results are consistent with earlier experimental results using induced values. The most important finding is that English auctions appear to elicit lower bids than Vickrey auctions, after controlling for observable socio-economic characteristics. Moreover, English auction bids also exhibit significantly less residual variance and may be sensitive to the number of rival bidders. It appears that the real-time learning allowed in the English auction significantly affects subject behavior. We also find that values elicited with the Becker, DeGroot and Marshak institution differ from those in both English and Vickrey auctions. Received November 1993/Final version May 1995     

Separation between second price auctions with personalized reserves and the revenue optimal auction

When buyer valuations are drawn IID from a known regular distribution, a second price auction with a symmetric reserve price is the revenue-optimal single-item auction. When this distribution is irregular, we provide the first separation result showing that a second price auction with reserves earns at most 0.778 times the revenue of Myerson’s optimal auction, even when the reserves can be asymmetric. Since the lower bound is 0.745 for i.i.d. buyers, our result is nearly tight.     

Generalized lot sentencing rule for estimating the value of production lot for sale

In the traditional lot sentencing rule, a buyer arrives to one of two decisions regarding lot disposition; either accept or reject a lot. However, it is more appropriate to consider choices between those two extreme decisions. A clear case where the traditional lot sentencing rule is not flexible is when a buyer purchases a lot from an English auction. In this paper, we propose a model that helps a buyer in estimating the value of a production lot. This model can be used by a bidder before the bidding process starts to estimate the value of an auctioned lot. The model provides an action plan that includes the estimated acquisition cost as a function of the number of defective items found in a random sample. Unlike the traditional lot sentencing rule, the proposed rule is more flexible and provides buyers with wider range of possible actions.     

Auctions with an asking price

This paper studies a sales mechanism, prevalent in housing markets, where the seller does not reveal or commit to a reserve price but instead publicly announces an asking price. We show that the seller sets an asking price such that, in equilibrium, buyers of certain types would accept it with positive probability. We also show that this sales mechanism, with an optimally chosen asking price set prior to the seller learning her value, does better than any standard auction with a reserve price equal to the seller’s reservation value. We then extend the analysis to the case where the asking price reveals information about the seller’s reservation value. We show that in this case there is a separating equilibrium with fully-revealing asking prices, which is revenue-equivalent to a standard auction with a reserve price set at the seller’s reservation value.     

Manipulation via endowments in auctions with multiple goods

We study manipulation via endowments in a market in an auction setting with multiple goods. In the market, there are buyers whose valuations are their private information, and a seller whose set of endowments is her private information. A social planner, who wants to implement a socially desirable allocation, faces the seller’s manipulation via endowments, in addition to buyers’ manipulation of misreporting their valuations. We call a mechanism immune to the seller’s manipulation via endowments destruction-proof. In general, there exists no mechanism which is destruction-proof, together with strategy-proofness of the buyers, efficiency, and participation. Nevertheless, we find a restricted domain of the buyers’ valuation profiles satisfying a new condition called per-capita goods–buyer submodularity. We show that, in this domain, there exists a mechanism which is destruction-proof, together with the above properties. The restriction is likely to be met when each winner’s valuation is close to the next-highest valuation. We also provide a relation to monopoly theory, and argue that per-capita goods–buyer submodularity is independent of the standard elasticity argument.     

A double-sided multiunit combinatorial auction for substitutes: Theory and algorithms

Combinatorial exchanges have existed for a long time in securities markets. In these auctions buyers and sellers can place orders on combinations, or bundles of different securities. These orders are conjunctive: they are matched only if the full bundle is available. On business-to-business (B2B) exchanges, buyers have the choice to receive the same product with different attributes; for instance the same product can be produced by different sellers. A buyer indicates his preference by submitting a disjunctive order, where he specifies the quantity he wants of each particular good and what limit price he is willing to pay for each good, thus providing a subjective valuation of each attribute. Only the goods with the best prices will be traded. This article considers a doubled-sided multiunit combinatorial auction for substitutes, that is, a uniform price auction where buyers and sellers place both types of orders, conjunctive (AND orders) and disjunctive (XOR orders). We show that linear competitive prices exist. We also propose an algorithm to clear the market, which is particularly efficient when the number of traders is large, and the goods are divisible.     

Impact of supply base heterogeneity in electronic markets

Internet based marketplaces have enabled industrial buyers to locate suppliers from geographically diverse locations. This has resulted in increased variations in certain supplier parameters such as capacity and cost among the participating suppliers. However, the impact of this increased heterogeneity on the procurement practices are not well understood. In this paper we consider three supplier parameters that can affect the price the buyer pays and the number of suppliers that the buyer will select for award of contract. These attributes are capacity, production cost and demand for supplier’s capacity. We show how these parameters impact the price that a supplier quotes. We also show how the buyer will determine the optimum number of suppliers using a reverse auction mechanism when he does not have perfect knowledge of the suppliers’ parameters. Our model suggests that buyers need to adjust some of the input parameters while procuring capacity from a heterogeneous supply base. For instance, buyers need to pre-qualify more suppliers if the supply base has greater heterogeneity.     

Portfolio choice and optimal hedging with general risk functions: A simplex-like algorithm

The minimization of general risk functions is becoming more and more important in portfolio choice theory and optimal hedging. There are two major reasons. Firstly, heavy tails and the lack of symmetry in the returns of many assets provokes that the classical optimization of the standard deviation may lead to dominated strategies, from the point of view of the second order stochastic dominance. Secondly, but not less important, many institutional investors must respect legal capital requirements, which may be more easily studied if one deals with a risk measure related to capital losses.     

On the impact of low-balling: Experimental results in asymmetric auctions

The paper reports on a series of asymmetric auction experiments with private-independent values and two buyers. Maskin and Riley (2000) showed, under some conditions, that if one buyer has a greater probability than the other of not being able to bid, first-price auctions could yield lower revenues to the seller than second-price auctions. The data rejected this prediction because of an important overbidding when subjects received low values in first-price auctions. In this asymmetric setting, the observed overbidding cannot be explained by the usual risk aversion hypothesis and the detection of a learning pattern indicates that subjects used more an adaptive behaviour than a static one. An ad hoc bidding strategy for the buyers who are the most likely to bid explains the observed low bids better than the risk neutral equilibrium strategy. Finally, as subjects appear to have bid in equilibrium as if there were two other competitors instead of only one, their bidding behaviour can be thought to have displayed an over anxiousness about winning. Received: January 1999/Final version June 2001     

Multi-criteria auctions without full comparability of bids

The emergence of auction mechanisms that support bids characterized by several attributes is one of the most recent evolutions within auction theory. These mechanisms, referred to as multi-attribute, multiple issue or multi-dimensional auctions, are at the intersection between multi-criteria decision and auction theories. The purpose of this paper is to introduce multi-criteria auctions the originality of which is not to require full comparability between bids. We claim that this distinctive feature is of great interest, especially in procurement situations. Furthermore, the existence of potential incomparability between multi-dimensional offers will permit us to manage different bidding niches coexisting within the same bidding space. A theoretical framework based on a general preference structure will be introduced and then referenced to existing approaches such as multi-attribute auctions or new ones such as dominance based multi-criteria auctions or butterfly auctions.     

The communication complexity of private value single-item auctions

This paper is concerned with information revelation in single-item auctions. We compute how much data needs to be transmitted in three strategically equivalent auctions—the Vickrey auction, the English auction and the recently proposed bisection auction—and show that in the truth-telling equilibrium the bisection auction is the best performer.     

Best replies and adaptive learning

This paper discusses the relationships between learning processes based on the iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies and their myopic and more naive counterparts. The concept of a monotone game, of which games with strategic complementarities are a subclass, is introduced. Then it is shown that convergence under best reply dynamics and dominance solvability are equivalent for all two-player (and some many-player) games in this class.     

Multiple objective data envelopment analysis as applied to the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry

The change of Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) from a softer process patenting to a stronger product patenting in Indian Pharmaceutical Industry (IPI) is attracting many global drug majors to source their production from India, which is the fourth largest producer of pharmaceuticals in the world. In this paper, the interests of different stake holders like the buyers (multinational enterprises), who are searching for efficient partners and the vendors (Indian drug producers) that are competing for the contracts, are analysed for a suitable efficiency evaluation criterion. The primary objective of this paper is to study how various firms in the IPI with different business strategies, competing for the same opportunities can find suitable benchmarking peer groups to meet the challenges of a dynamic business environment using data envelopment analysis (DEA). A multiple objective DEA model that determines suitable peer groups for inefficient companies is discussed along with more traditional DEA models. The proposed model has the flexibility to include inputs like R&D expenditure and outputs like Exports that are not homogeneously distributed across the firms and address the interests of various stake holders like buyers and vendors simultaneously.     

Dominance solvable games and trees

We study social choice functions represented by Moulin's dominance solvable games. We first show that dominance solvability of games is independent of the order in which dominated strategies are deleted. This implies that the perfect equilibrium of a game with perfect information generally coincides with its solution according to dominance solvability. Then we show that a large class of d-solvable games yields the same social choice functions as those represented by games of perfect information. We show that for three alternatives and all n relatively prime to 6 there exists a method of social choice fractional elimination, which can be represented by a kingmaker tree. This covers some cases not previously covered by Moulin. We also find numerous examples.     

Dynamic decision making without expected utility: An operational approach

Non-expected utility theories, such as rank dependent utility (RDU) theory, have been proposed as alternative models to EU theory in decision making under risk. These models do not share the separability property of expected utility theory. This implies that, in a decision tree, if the reduction of compound lotteries assumption is made (so that preferences at each decision node reduce to RDU preferences among lotteries) and that preferences at different decision nodes are identical (same utility function and same weighting function), then the preferences are not dynamically consistent; in particular, the sophisticated strategy, i.e., the strategy generated by a standard rolling back of the decision tree, is likely to be dominated w.r.t. stochastic dominance. Dynamic consistency of choices remains feasible, and the decision maker can avoid dominated choices, by adopting a non-consequentialist behavior, with his choices in a subtree possibly depending on what happens in the rest of the tree. We propose a procedure which: (i) although adopting a non-consequentialist behavior, involves a form of rolling back of the decision tree; (ii) selects a non-dominated strategy that realizes a compromise between the decision maker’s discordant goals at the different decision nodes. Relative to the computations involved in the standard expected utility evaluation of a decision problem, the main computational increase is due to the identification of non-dominated strategies by linear programming. A simulation, using the rank dependent utility criterion, confirms the computational tractability of the model.     

A new end-of-auction model for curbing sniping

The online auction market has been growing at a spectacular rate. Most auctionsare open-bid auctions where all the participants know the current highest bid.This knowledge has led to a phenomenon known as sniping, whereby somebidders may wait until the last possible moment before bidding, therebydepriving other bidders of the opportunity to respond and also preventingsellers from obtaining the highest price for an item. This is especially true inthe case of the commonly used second-price, fixed-deadline auction. We considera procedure involving a randomly determined stopping time and show that thisapproach eliminates the potential benefits to a sniper. The scheme enables allbidders to compete more fairly and promotes an early bidding strategy, which islikely to increase the price received by the seller while providing adequatebidding opportunities for would-be buyers.     

Contingent payment auction mechanism in multidimensional procurement auctions

This paper considers the auctioning of an indivisible project among several suppliers who hold private information about their own efficiency type. Both quality and price need to be determined. Different from scoring auctions, we present a new method, i.e., contingent payment auction mechanism (CPAM), which can effectively deal with the optimal procurement strategy in multidimensional procurement auctions. CPAM can implement the optimal mechanism for the buyer and is thus optimal among all possible procurement strategies. CPAM implies that the buyer should first design and announce a contingent payment function that specifies a payment for each possible quality level before the bidding begins. Compared to scoring auctions, CPAM has some advantages. It does not require a special form of scoring rule and can be generalized in a more broad auction formats. Furthermore, it can help us to solve the ex post moral hazard problem. We consider two kinds of CPAM. For the CPAM I is sensitive to different auction formats, we come up with CPAM II which can improve the performance of CPAM I. Broadly speaking, CPAM integrates the idea of dimension reduction from scoring auction into that of incentive contract design from contract theory to solve the problem of ex post moral hazard.     

Responsive and strong responsive evolutionary dynamics

We extend Relative Monotonic Dynamics to Responsive Dynamics (RDs) to permit the response of the population to be history dependent, discontinuous and delayed. We introduce Strong Responsive Dynamics (SRDs) to model populations that are a little more responsive than in RDs, and define a relationship called quasi-strict dominance which characterizes the strategies that eventually die out under SRDs. These non-surviving strategies include the strategies that are weakly dominated by a pure strategy. If the game is quasi-strict-dominance solvable, then a SRD will converge to the quasi-strict-dominance solution, which is a weak proper NE. If the game is “quasi-strict-dominance ordered”, then a SRD will converge to a proper NE.