A Comparison of Prices Brought by English Auctions and Private Negotiations

A comparison of house prices brought by English auctions and private negotiations produced evidence that the pricing mechanism matters. In an active market for middle- to high-priced houses, auctions extracted higher prices than private negotiations.     

Cotton Reserves Auctions Touch 57% of Release Plan but Prices Rally

With manufacturing slowly recovering amid improving economic conditions, cotton demand has increased prompting more orders among mills. However, with a deficient supply of cotton in the market, prices extend     

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.     

Buyer Alliances as Countervailing Power in WIC Infant-Formula Auctions

State agencies in infant-formula procurement auctions receive lower bids when they are in buyer alliances than when they are unallied. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) uses an auction to procure infant formula. Manufacturers bid on the right to be an agency’s sole supplier by offering a rebate on formula sold through WIC. Agencies frequently join together in buyer alliances. An empirical estimation shows that bids are lower to alliances and that lower prices result because alliances are heterogeneous. Results suggest that when heterogeneity is not controlled, bids decline with alliance size, which has policy implications because Congress recently limited alliance size.     

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.     

Last-Minute Bidding in Sequential Auctions with Unobserved, Stochastic Entry

Using a dataset of calculator auctions on eBay, we first show that last-minute bidding is not merely the result of bidders’ going to the next-to-close auction. Instead, bidding is concentrated at the end of the period in which the auction is the next to close, suggesting the existence of strategic last-minute bidding. Then, we model repeated, ascending price auctions for homogeneous goods with unobserved, stochastic entry. We show that the dynamic game has a pure-strategy symmetric equilibrium in which entrants always reveal themselves by bidding in the auction in which they arrive, and bidding occurs at the last minute.     

Price Sensitivity of Hourly Day-ahead and Quarter-hourly Intraday Auctions in Germany

The introduction of the quarter-hourly intraday auction in 2014 for the German market confirms a tendency towards short-term energy markets. The reason for the new market was the need to trade shorter periods than just hours a day-ahead to minimize open positions in the more volatile continuous intraday trading. The increased production capacity of solar power boosted this requirement for new short-term power products. The quarter-hourly market shows a distinctive zigzag price formation. We identify two influencing factors: first, the solar residual that combines the trading of solar power ramps around midday as well as the gradients of consumption and thermal power plant ramps throughout the course of the day, and second, a characteristic two stage market design with higher liquidity for the hourly than for the quarter-hourly auction. Therefore, demand, solar generation and inflexible ramps of thermal power plants are hedged at the hourly day-ahead auction and use the quarter-hourly auction only to balance the remaining differences. To prove this argument the price sensitivities of the hourly day-ahead and quarter-hourly intraday auctions in Germany are compared based on actual bid and ask curves from 2015 and 2016. Finally, the development of an adequate design of future spot markets is discussed.     

Efficiency in Second-Price Auctions: A New Look at Old Data

Experiments on second-price sealed-bid private value auctions have established that subjects typically bid more than their value, despite the fact that value bidding is a dominant strategy in such auctions. Moreover, the laboratory evidence shows that subjects do not learn to bid their values as they gain more experience. In the present paper, we re-examine the second-price auction data from Kagel and Levin’s (Econ J 103:868–879, 1993) classic paper. We find that auction efficiency increases over time, even though the frequency of overbidding is unchanged. We argue that the rise in efficiency is due to a decline in the variability of overbidding. This is consistent with subjects’ learning to bid more like each other.     

农村销售电价梳理——农电发展呼唤合理电价

趸售县销售电价存在的问题和矛盾地方政府越权出台优惠电价政策。一些地方政府为发展地方经济,将电价作为优化投资环境的主要手段,以承诺函、政府文件、会议纪要、招商引资协议书等形式,降低销售电价,价差由电力企业承担。地方政府制定了名目繁多的电价优惠政策,如免收基本电费、工业园区优惠电价、特殊企业特殊电价、重点企业扩大再生产优惠电价,或任意延长丰水期下浮目录电价水平等,使电力企业背上沉重的经济包袱。据福建省物价局2004年的一份统计资料表明:全省61个趸售县中,有32家县电力公司因地方政府干预而被迫实行优惠电价;2003年,有1…     

Auctions with toeholds: An experimental study of company takeovers

We run experiments on English Auctions where the bidders already own a part (toehold) of the good for sale. The theory predicts a very strong (“explosive”) effect of even small toeholds. While asymmetric toeholds do have an effect on bids and revenues in the lab, which gets stronger the larger the asymmetry, it is not nearly as strong as predicted. We explain this by analyzing the flatness of the payoff functions, which leads to large deviations from the equilibrium strategies being relatively costless. This is a general fundamental weakness of this type of explosive equilibria, which makes them fail when human players are involved. Our analysis shows that a levels of reasoning model explains the results better where this equilibrium fails. Moreover, we find that although big toeholds can be effective in a takeover battle, the cost to acquire them might be higher than the strategic benefit they bring.     

Prices for long-distance voice telephony in Germany

This paper examines the first 16 months of competition in the German market for long-distance voice telephony on the fixed network. It concentrates on price level and price structure. Competition induced by the entry of both network operators and switch-based service providers decreased the price level substantially. Furthermore, after initial attempts to design innovative price structures, most firms gave up differentiation, and instead charged uniform prices for long-distance calls for residential customers. Moreover, the decrease in the price level seems to have induced a shift in the peak-load structure, which raises concern about the regulation of the peak-load structure of interconnection charges.     

2004年世界部分国家天然气终端价格

国家工业用发电途民用加拿大202.6*—422.7*捷克241.6—391.9芬兰189.2161.7299.7法国275.9—604.8希腊257.1—576.5爱尔兰324.1—633.3墨西哥226.2*226.2*—荷兰253.1*—758.4新西兰378.6—657.5波兰199.4—376.2葡萄牙317.6268.91010.1斯洛伐克270.0270.0390.7西班牙237.6*—705.7*瑞士391.4—289.1土耳其261.2253.3289.1英国206.2172.4*470.1美国267.1256.8457.9注:*为2004年第三季度价格;表中其他数据为2004年平均价格资料来源:Energy Prices and Taxes.IEA Statistics.200(51):355～357(刘倩如)2004年世界部分国家天然气终端价格@刘…     

2001年世界部分国家和地区天然气终端价格

(以净热值为基础计算) 单位:美元/吨油当量┏━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓┃ ┃ 用途 ┃ ┃ 用途 ┃┃ 国家或地区 ┃ ┃ 国家或地区 ┃ ┃┃ ┣━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┫ ┣━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━┫┃ ┃ 工业 ┃ 发电 ┃ 民用 ┃ ┃ 工业 ┃ 发电 ┃ 民用 ┃┣━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━╋…