Single Bidders and Tacit Collusion in Highway Procurement Auctions

Collusion in auctions can take different forms, such as refraining from bidding. Certain aspects of highway procurement auctions facilitate collusive outcomes. We collect data on asphalt paving auctions conducted in Kentucky from 2005-2007. We determine the potential service area of each asphalt plant and potential bidders for each paving project. We analyze firms’ bid participation decisions, including variables affecting costs as well as competitive and strategic effects. In many geographic markets where firms face only a few identifiable rivals, county boundaries serve as a coordinating mechanism for softening competition, significantly influencing firms’ decisions whether and how much to bid.     

Bid Roundness Under Collusion in Japanese Procurement Auctions

We analyze the “roundness level” of bids—defined as the number of zeros at the end of the bid—in public procurement auctions for construction works in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, where a bid-rigging case was filed. We hypothesize that bid rigging increases the roundness of bids through the bid coordination process. Specifically, winners choose round numbers to avoid any miscommunication when they announce their planned bids to other ring members, and losers prefer round numbers when they arbitrarily bid above the winning bid. We find that (1) there is a positive relationship between the roundness of a bid and its relative value as a fraction of the reserve price, (2) the roundness of bids is higher when collusion is active than when it is inactive, (3) among the ring bids, the roundness of the lowest bids is even higher than that of the other bids, and (4) bids by non-ring members are also round when collusion is active.     

Asymmetric Cost Pass-Through in Multi-Unit Procurement Auctions: An Experimental Approach*

We explore input cost pass-through in multi-unit procurement auctions. Whether cost shocks are private versus common across firms has important implications for discriminatory, but not uniform price auctions. We provide evidence of asymmetric pass-through of private cost shocks in discriminatory auctions. Unlike uniform price auctions, revenue-maximizing bidders in discriminatory auctions ‘pad’ bids close to the expected clearing price for units with costs below that price, but they do not bid below cost on higher cost units. Therefore, if costs are higher than expected, the clearing price rises and if costs are lower than expected, the clearing price remains high.     

The Impact of Timing on Bidding Behavior in Procurement Auctions of Contracts with Private Costs

We provide a comparison of bidding behavior between multi-round and single-round auctions considering bid lettings for asphalt construction contracts that are known to have primarily private costs. Using a reduced-form difference-in-difference approach as well as the nonparametric estimation technique that was proposed by Racine and Li (J Econom 119(1):99–130, 2004) we find that bidding is more aggressive in a sequential multi-round setting than in a simultaneous single-round format. We explore potential causes for the bidding difference across formats that are related to synergies and the level of bidder participation.     

Price Formation Under Small Numbers Competition: Evidence from Land Auctions in Singapore

This article examines the price formation process under small numbers competition using data from Singapore land auctions. The theory predicts that bid prices are less than the zero-profit asset value in these first-price sealed-bid auctions. The model also shows that expected sales price increases with the number of bidders both because each bidder has an incentive to offer a higher price and because of a greater likelihood that a high-value bidder is present. The empirical estimates are consistent with auction theory and show that the standard land attributes are reflected in auction prices as expected.     

基于公私共生的公共工程采购模式

随着基础设施建设的发展,公共工程的采购模式也不断创新.将共生理论引入公私合作模式中,把政府与私营方视为系统两个独立的方面,对照共生模式中的基本类型,将政府与私营方之间的合作关系视为非对称互惠模式.文章通过博弈论分析了政府和私营方在共生模式下如何达到帕累托最优状态;运用价值网对政府与私营方的价值流进行分析,研究了政府与私营方共生的内在机理.文章通过能量损耗与共生能量的分配原则,提出了政府与私营方之间风险分担和利益分配的概念模型.     

A Multinomial Logit Framework to Estimate Bid Shading in Procurement Auctions: Application to Cattle Sales in the Texas Panhandle

We develop an empirical methodology based upon multinomial probability models to estimate the magnitude of bid shading in cattle procurement in the Texas Panhandle region. The methodology works well in settings where data allow a good estimation of a bidder’s probability of winning, but the approach does not rely upon the bidding process following any particular structural framework or on the existence of a control group. Estimated markdowns of price from the competitive level are in the range of 5–10% and are somewhat larger than estimates of oligopsony markdowns from previous studies of cattle procurement in the U.S.     

Resident Bid Preference,Affiliation, and Procurement Competition: Evidence from New Mexico

In public procurement auctions, governments routinely offer preferences to qualified firms in the form of bid discounts. Previous studies on bid discounting do not account for affiliation – a form of cost dependence between bidders that is likely to occur in a public procurement environment. Utilizing data from the New Mexico Department of Transportation’s Resident Preference Program, I develop and estimate an empirical model of firm bidding and entry that allows for affiliation in firms’ project costs. I find evidence of affiliation and show how it changes preference auction outcomes.     

Auctions in financial markets

In this article I discuss how auctions and tools developed for their empirical analysis can inform empirical analysis of financial markets. Since virtually all markets organized as auctions have well-specified and known rules that map nicely into game-theoretical models, I demonstrate using several applications that one can often leverage particular details to study issues that have nothing to do with the auction per se. To do so, I first review an estimation method, which is widely applicable in many settings where a researcher needs to recover agents’ beliefs, in order to establish a link between observables and unobservables using some version of a necessary condition for optimality. I then discuss applications to quantification of front-running, evaluation of quantitative easing operations and estimation of a demand system for financial products.     

Public Procurement of Innovation: Evidence from a German Legislative Reform

Using public procurement to promote private innovation activities has attracted increasing attention recently. Germany implemented a legal change in its procurement framework in 2009, which allowed government agencies to specify innovative aspects of procured products as selection criteria in calls for tender. We analyze a sample of 3410 German firms to investigate whether this reform stimulated innovation in the business sector. Across a wide range of specifications – OLS, nearest-neighbor matching, IV regressions and difference-in-differences – we find a robust and significant effect of innovation-directed public procurement on turnover with new products and services. At the same time, our results demonstrate that public procurement mainly stimulates innovations of more incremental nature rather than true market novelties.     

Reserve Prices in Repeated Auctions

This paper aims to estimate the effect of imposing a reserve price in repeated auctions of homogeneous items. I model the behavior of impatient bidders who search for the best auction outcome over time. The model is used to develop estimating equations for the bidders’ valuations, and to evaluate the effect of reserve prices on bids and revenue. Using data collected from surplus auctions of personal computer processors, I find economically significant gains from imposing a reserve price. The revenue-maximizing reserve price improves revenue by about 23% for a large subsample of the auctions in the data.     

煤炭企业技术岗位公开竞聘存在问题及对策

以山东能源临矿集团为例,介绍了临矿集团为解决人才断崖问题,推行技术岗位和管理岗位"双通道"人才晋升发展的模式情况,并对在岗位公开竞聘中存在的问题进行分析,提出了实施适当轮岗交流、健全和完善"管理、技术、技能"3个通道等人力资源优化配置的相关对策。     

Auctions with bid credits and resale

Bid credits favoring subsets of bidders are routinely imposed on auctions and procurement auctions. These bid credits result in inefficient auction outcomes, which create pressure for post-auction resale or, in a procurement context, for subcontracting. We show that the presence of resale, in turn, affects bidding strategies in such a way that auction outcomes are more likely to be inefficient and less informative, making it harder for resale to correct inefficiencies. The negative effects of bid credits and resale can be mitigated through direct restrictions on resale, tight caps on credits, reserve prices, anonymous bidding, and enhanced competition.     

Auctions with quantity externalities and endogenous supply

This paper studies the design of license auctions when the number of licenses allocated in the auction determines structure of the post-auction market. I first show that a sequence of conditional reserve prices that specify minimum acceptable bid at each supply level can be used to determine supply endogenously. Then I construct a static auction called multi-dimensional uniform-price auction and a dynamic auction called Walrasian clock auction that allow the auctioneer to condition reserve price on supply and allow bidders to condition bids on supply. I show that both proposed auctions can implement the efficient market structure that maximizes total surplus in the post-auction market in a dominant strategy equilibrium. I next characterize the optimal auction and show that the two proposed auctions can yield the optimal revenue under a sequence of optimal reserve prices.     

采购限制下的电子采购策略库存水平分析

库存是影响供应链成本性能的主要因素之一,有效地减少库存可以降低整个供应链的成本性能,因此库存管理是优化供应链运作、提高竞争优势的重要手段。论文针对库存管理中的(s,S)策略,建立了库存水平变化的模型,分别分析了无采购条件限制和有采购条件限制下的库存水平的变化,并分别给出了期望值和方差。     

Effects of Transparency in Procurement Practices on Government Expenditure: A Case Study of Municipal Public Works

This paper examines the effect of improved transparency in the bidder qualification process, using the experience gained from a case study of municipal public works auctions. A difference-in-differences analysis reveals that improved transparency reduces procurement cost by up to 8%. This finding is robust with regard to the concerns of both endogeneity and sample selectivity. The bidding-function estimates, combined with features of Japanese procurement system, imply that the introduction of transparent practices is insufficient to bring about efficiency in public procurement.      

The Role of Competition in Natural Monopoly: Costs, Public Ownership, and Regulation

Conventional policy for industries with very high economies of scale is to permit monopoly but to subject it to regulation or public ownership. Since the latter may not result in cost minimization, however, it is possible that competition, by forcing firms to operate at the cost frontier, may be less costly despite sacrificing some scale economies. The paper sets out the relevant analytical considerations, estimates a cost function for electric distribution utilities in the U.S., and tests for the relative costs of monopoly and duopoly utilities. Among other notable findings, it concludes that competition does indeed lower net costs.     

Bid-Rigging in Auctions for Korean Public-Works Contracts and Potential Damage

This research is an empirical study to find solid statistical evidence of collusion inauction for construction contracts and to gauge the possible effects of bid-rigging onauction prices in Korea. Using limited information contained in sketch bid data, weshow that local construction firms enjoy statistically significant incumbency premiumsin their incumbent sites. Thus, it is inferred that contractors engage in complementarybidding, in which all bidders, except one, submit high bids so as to lose. The statisticalevidence of the incumbency effect is also confirmed in long-running civil engineeringconstruction contracts, which are carried out over several years. Utilizing the transitionfrom a cooperative to non-cooperative regime, we also estimate the potential damage ofstructural bid rigging in public-works contracts by year, contractor and construction type. The estimated overcharge ratio based on a forecasting approach is 15.5% of the total expenditures from January 1995 to June 1998. We also present potential damage estimates by the firm. The estimated overcharge by contractor offers a guideline for the proper allocation of the total overcharges to construction contractors in case contractors are charged with bid-rigging and found guilty.