Allocation of track capacity: Experimental evidence on the use of priority auctioning in the railway industry

Allocation of track capacity concerns multiple users facing demand indivisibilities, running trains over an inelastic supply of railway tracks. The paper suggests a Vickrey-type mechanism to handle incentive aspects of this technically complex optimisation task. Here, the price for operating a train will correspond to the bids foregone by other operators who are pushed off their preferred routes. The paper reports the results of 11 experimental markets using variations of this mechanism where each market includes up to 10 trading periods, and subjects bid for routes over a highly stylised railway network. The experiments generated solutions that capture 90–100% of potential benefits.     

ATM交换中影响信元丢失性能内在因素的研究

本文首先建立ＡＴＭ交换中呼叫阻塞与信元丢失间的相关数学模型，然后通过数值计算和仿真结果，定量地给出了呼叫阻塞及其占有起伏对信元丢失性能产生的影响。     

高科技产品的三阶段细分营销电子商务模型

高科技产品具有其与普通商品所不同的特性 ,其质量随着时间的推移而损耗 ,而且复制成本相对于总开发成本来说相当小。只有针对高科技产品在产品生命周期的各阶段的特点 ,结合传统渠道、电子商务技术的各自优点 ,以科学的模型对营销周期进行分析 ,对不同的阶段采取不同程度的价格歧视策略 ,才能最大化的实现利润和最大程度地抵抗风险。拍卖这种博奕机制在电子商务的条件下成为了一种良好的实现一度价格歧视的方法 ,将在高科技产品的营销过程中发挥出越来越大的作用。     

Snipers, Stalkers, and Nibblers: Online Auction Business Ethics

Spirited disagreement exists among online auction participants over the ethics of sniping: delaying one's bid until the closing seconds of an online auction. Through analysis of the structural features of online auctions and by deploying Rawls's (1955) distinction between justifying an action under a practice and justifying the practice itself, I argue that: (i) the disagreement is better conceived as one over the ethics of online auction hosting (and therefore, over business ethics) than over the ethics of online auction participation; (ii) so conceived, the argument against sniping is nonetheless implausible; and (iii) the disagreement remains interesting not on the merits, but for the curious fact that it is bidders who complain about sniping.     

Marketing: Who's really minding the store globally?

In today's highly competitive global marketplace, firms have increasingly turned to outsourcing. In fact, it is not just “blue collar” jobs being outsourced, but “white collar” jobs, as well. Even marketing, “the window to the company's worldwide customer base,” is feeling outsourcing pressures. This article takes a look at the corporate implications of outsourcing global marketing functions and reports the findings of a telephone survey conducted among U.S. and Canadian marketing executives. U.S. firms were found to outsource marketing activities more frequently than Canadian firms, often at the expense of control and customer satisfaction.     

浅析“招拍挂”与地价的关系

2009年是"地王"频发的一年,土地价格惊心动魄地上扬,甚至一些地方出现了"面粉比面包贵"的非正常现象。"招拍挂"引入市场竞争机制对土地资源进行配置,是实现土地价值的良好途径,但其供给垄断和需求竞争的模式及"价高者得"的特点,同时也会推高地价,对价格机制产生破坏,造成市场失灵的情况发生。本文从介绍城市土地配置方式的转变入手,基于土地价格机制理论分析了"招拍挂"与地价的影响,最后提出了改良"招拍挂"的建议。     

A Framework for Electronic Reverse Auction (eRA) Research

ABSTRACT

After nearly two decades, electronic reserve auction (eRA) continues to be a widely-used eProcurement tool. Buyers report that eRA helps them reap savings in cost and procurement time and expands the pool of eligible suppliers. Suppliers point out reduced operating, selling or customer acquisition costs, a more level playing field, and access to new markets. However, questions have been raised about the actual benefits of eRA for buyers and suppliers and its potentially negative impact on buyer-supplier relationships. Given the controversy over the nature of the outcomes actually achieved with eRA, more research is needed to provide insights that can guide buyers and suppliers toward effective use of eRA. To this end, this paper identifies independent variables which impact electronic reverse auction outcomes, intervening process variables related to the way eRA is implemented, and outcome variables that are important to buyers and suppliers who use eRA. The variables are mapped onto a framework, and future research directions related to these variables are discussed.     

Lottery versus all-pay auction contests: A revenue dominance theorem

We allow a contest organizer to bias a contest in a discriminatory way; i.e., she can favor specific contestants by designing the contest rule in order to maximize total equilibrium effort (resp. revenue). The two predominant contest regimes are considered, all-pay auctions and lottery contests. For all-pay auctions the optimal bias is derived in closed form: It implies extreme competitive pressure among active contestants and low endogenous participation rates. Moreover, the exclusion principle advanced by Baye et al. (1993) becomes obsolete in this case. In contrast, the optimally biased lottery induces a higher number of actively participating contestants due to softer competition. Our main result regarding total revenue comparison under the optimal biases reveals that the all-pay auction revenue-dominates the lottery contest for all levels of heterogeneity among contestants. The incentive effect due to a strongly discriminating contest rule (all-pay auction) dominates the participation effect due to a weakly discriminating contest rule (lottery).     

Effects of Information on Consumers' Willingness to Pay for Golden Rice

We examine the effects of information on consumer bidding behavior using a uniform‐price auction with four units supply for golden rice. Our findings show that mean willingness to pay (WTP) bids are highest under positive information, followed by no information, negative information, and unexpectedly lowest with two‐sided information. Participants might have put more weight on the negative when faced with both positive and negative information. There is also a minor difference in WTP with respect to the reference price between positive information and no information. Furthermore, the marginal effect on WTP of positive information vis‐à‐vis no information is minimal. This suggests that the positive information faced by consumers might not be compelling enough to drastically increase WTP bids for a genetically modified product such as golden rice.