Contesting the Value(s) of GM Wheat on the Canadian Prairies

This article investigates the ways in which a Canadian coalition of farmers, consumers, and environmental, health, and industry organisations politicised the value of Monsanto's proposed Roundup Ready (RR) wheat in the early 2000s. Eventually pressured to withdraw its application for unconfined release of RR wheat in 2004, I argue that Monsanto's proposed RR wheat economy crossed moral boundaries for the groups involved in the coalition against RR wheat. Specifically, Monsanto's anticipated RR wheat economy violated producers' expectations about their cultural-economic livelihoods: it proposed uncertainty in the realms of exchange and use value, moved public surplus into private hands and infringed on cultural attachments to wheat. My theoretical contribution hinges on the concept of moral economy, which is conventionally understood as promoting a ‘cultural turn’ in economic explanations. Instead, I show how Marx's labour theory of value similarly pointed to the inextricability of economic values and cultural processes and their attachment to all commodities including labour.     

Monotonicity and Rationalizability in a Large First Price Auction

This paper proves that the monotonicity of bidding strategies together with the rationality of bidders implies that the winning bid in a first price auction converges to the competitive equilibrium price as the number of bidders increases ( Wilson, 1977 ). Instead of analysing the symmetric Nash equilibrium, we examine rationalizable strategies ( Bernheim (1984) , Pearce (1984) ) among the set of monotonic bidding strategies to prove that any monotonic rationalizable bidding strategy must be within a small neighbourhood of the „truthful” valuation of the object, conditioned on the signal received by the bidder. We obtain an information aggregation result similar to that of Wilson (1977) , while dispensing with almost all symmetric assumptions and using a milder solution concept than the Nash equilibrium. In particular, if every bidder is ex ante identical, then any rationalizable bidding strategy must be within a small neighbourhood of the symmetric Nash equilibrium. In a symmetric first price auction, the symmetry of outcomes is implied rather than assumed.     

The Performance of a Repeated Discriminatory Price Auction for Ecosystem Services

Environmental and Resource Economics - Government agencies often rely on repeated discriminatory price auctions to procure ecosystem services from private landowners despite limited evidence on...     

A Sealed-Bid Auction That Matches the English Auction

This paper analyzes a two-stage sealed-bid auction that is frequently employed in privatization, takeover, and merger and acquisition contests. This auction format yields the same expected revenue as the open ascending (English) auction, yet is less susceptible to preemptive bidding and collusion. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: D44.     

不同一口价组合拍卖机制下的卖方收益比较研究

随着电子商务的发展,作为网上拍卖方式之一的一口价拍卖逐渐盛行起来。网上一口价拍卖打破了时间和空间的限制,因而被广泛应用于组合拍卖中。笔者针对目前拍卖网站所采用的两种不同拍卖规则:固定一口价和持久一口价,在独立私人估价模型下分析比较了上述两种规则下的卖方期望收益。     

Outlet types and the Canadian Consumer Price Index

Recent phenomenal growth in popularity of large warehouse/discount stores has important implications for price measurement. Consumer substitution to such outlets could produce a bias in consumer price indexes (CPIs), which may be exacerbated by unrepresentative sampling and discount outlets' apparent slower rates of price increases. It is shown that in 1990-96 unit value indexes rose at a lower rate than the corresponding Canadian CPI subaggregate indexes for other household equipment, non-prescribed medicines, and audio equipment, and biases arising from unrepresentative sampling and differential rates of price increases across outlets have resulted in an additional overstatement for these subaggregates.
La croissance dans la popularité des magasins/entrepôts à forts escomptes au cours des der;chnières années a été fort importante et a eu des effets importants sur la mesure des prix. Le comportement du consommateur qui choisit ces magasins pourrait entraîner un biais dans la mesure des indices de prix à la consommation. Un échantillonage non représentatif et le fait que ces magasins semblent avoir des augmentations de prix plus faibles dans le temps peuvent biaiser encore plus les indices. Cette recherche montre que entre 1990 et 1996 les indices de la valeur unitaire ont cru à un taux plus faible que les indices correspondant de prix à la consommation pour des sous-agrégats comme autre ´equipement des ménages, médicaments non-prescrit, et ´equipement audio. Il semble que les biais engendrés par les différentiels de croissance des prix entre magasins et un échantillonnage non représentatif se soient traduits par un biais à la hausse dans ces sous-agrégats     

农产品市场价格波动的日历效应——基于花卉拍卖市场的实证研究

农产品价格的稳定关系着我国社会的和谐发展和国民经济的建设,其价格的波动可能会对农业生产和人民的生活带来严重的影响。农产品拍卖市场具有降低价格波动的优势特点,但是拍卖市场在我国的发展正处于起步阶段,农业拍品价格在部分区间仍然存在异常波动。从日历与价格角度出发,证明了在我国农产品拍卖市场中存在着一系列引起价格异常波动的日历效应。     

建筑业招投标中“平均价中标”的实验研究

本文通过实验室实验研究私人独立价值（IPV）假定和共同价值（CV）假定下平均价中标的拍卖。无投标限价时,IPV拍卖的报价迅速收敛至前期平均价,而CV拍卖的报价并未有明显的收敛趋势。有投标限价时,CV拍卖的报价均收敛于投标限价,报价的波动几乎与投标限价的起伏重合,而IPV拍卖的报价却没有随投标限价的起伏而有大幅的波动,仍收敛至前期的平均价格。IPV拍卖的平均报价或中标价格和中标企业的成本没有很大的联系,平均价中标几乎不能配置资源至成本最低的企业。无投标限价CV拍卖虽然避免了“赢家诅咒”问题,但报价普遍偏高;而设立较低的投标限价虽可能降低价格,但和最低价中标拍卖一样,不可避免遭遇“赢家诅咒”问题,同时投标限价很容易成为竞拍者协调报价的共同信息。     

双向拍卖中的“零信息”模型研究

首先介绍了双向拍卖与单向拍卖的本质区别，然后分析了双向拍卖市场中的买卖双方所面临的复杂报价决策过程，最后在分析“零信息”报价模型和“增强型零信息”报价模型的基础上，提出了一种通用的“零信息”报价模型－－k-ZI模型。     

Auction Design for the Allocation of Emission Permits in the Presence of Market Power

To the extent that emission permits have been allocated using market mechanisms, this has been done using a sealed-bid auction design, typically with discriminatory prices. However, several authors have recommended the ascending auction format. Basically, two competing ascending auction designs have been suggested, the standard ascending auction (with clock or demand schedules), or an alternative ascending-clock implementation of Vickrey-pricing. The latter design was introduced as a response to problems of bid shading under the sealed-bid and the standard ascending auction format. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the allocation of permits under these two alternative mechanisms. The auction process and the resulting market outcome in the presence of oligopolistic competition are simulated. In this setting, it is not obvious that bid shading is the optimal strategy under the standard design, nor is it obvious that sincere bidding is the optimal strategy under the alternative ascending auction design. The alternative auction format makes it less costly to pursue a strategy to increase market shares through the acquisition of emission permits, thus increasing the competitor's costs, leading to overbidding as the optimal strategy.     

成本分担博弈与维克里拍卖机制研究

成本分担博弈中的平均分担机制往往导致参与人低报自己的收益率,从而导致博弈结果的无效率。笔者通过在成本分担博弈中引入维克里机制,利用参与人的占优策略——说真话,使成本分担博弈的结果实现了帕累托最优配置。     

Auction markets for dispatchable power: How to score the bids

Competitive bidding for electric generating capacity is becoming based on economic dispatch rather than the PURPA must-take norm. Incorporating economic dispatch into bidding requires different price scoring procedures. The avoided cost of a dispatchable project is determined by the energy price offered. Price scoring methods based on a percentage of avoided cost approach are uneconomically biased against baseload projects, because they neglect the duration effects of their dispatch. This bias is illustrated in a simple model of economic dispatch. A number of utilities use the percentage of avoided cost method for dispatchable capacity. They can correct the bias by using a net benefits per kW measure of economic value.     

Optimal Information Disclosure in Auctions and the Handicap Auction

We analyse a situation where a monopolist is selling an indivisible good to risk-neutral buyers who only have an estimate of their private valuations. The seller can release, without observing, certain additional signals that affect the buyers' valuations. Our main result is that in the expected revenue-maximizing mechanism, the seller makes available all the information that she can, and her expected revenue is the same as it would be if she could observe the part of the information that is "new" to the buyers. We also show that this mechanism can be implemented by what we call a handicap auction in interesting applications. In the first round of this auction, each buyer picks a price premium from a menu offered by the seller (a smaller premium costs more). Then the seller releases the additional signals. In the second round, the buyers bid in a second-price auction where the winner pays the sum of his premium and the second highest non-negative bid. In the case of a single buyer, this mechanism simplifies to a menu of European call options.     

中国国债的发行机制研究

从1996年国债发行开始采用招标方式时起,我国国债发行机制逐步地市场化、规范化。但应注意的是,我国国债招标发行机制还很不完善,在设计上,还存在着一些亟待改善的问题。完善国债发行机制,必须坚持国际经验与中国实际相结合的原则;必须坚持规范与发展相结合,以严格规范的制度来促进发展。     

网络拍卖的法律风险及对策

当前,越来越多的拍卖网站开始从事拍卖活动,但在目前我国对这些网络拍卖行为还没有明确的法律法规对之进行调整,网络拍卖行为存在着很大的法律风险。因此,应从网络拍卖的概念界定出发,探讨网络拍卖所面临的法律风险及其对策。     

A dynamic factor model for nowcasting Canadian GDP growth

This paper estimates a dynamic factor model (DFM) for nowcasting Canadian gross domestic product. The model is estimated with a mix of soft and hard indicators, and it features a high share of international data. The model is then used to generate nowcasts, predictions of the recent past and current state of the economy. In a pseudo-real-time setting, we show that the DFM outperforms univariate benchmarks, as well as other commonly used nowcasting models, such as MIDAS and bridge regressions.