Search

As an on-demand mobility service, parking reservations can greatly alleviate the issue of parking challenges. There are currently three primary strategies for parking reservation: first-come-first-served, permit reservation, and auction. In contrast to the first-come-first-served and permit-reserved strategies, the auction strategy uses dynamic pricing to allocate parking supplies efficiently based on the auction, which attracts more scholars for the research. However, parking reservations based on the auction process may have an inequity issue because drivers' age, gender, income level, and location of residence fluctuate. This inequity may limit the growth of reserved parking by influencing parking drivers' acceptance of reserved parking. But currently, very few scholars focus on the issue of reserved parking equity, and even fewer measure this nebulous and personal issue. In consideration of this, the Lorenz curve of parking reservation and the vertical equity index of parking reservation are proposed in this paper along with the calculation method for the index, which enables the problem of reserved parking vertical equity to be visualized and made concrete. The numerical experimental method is used to analyze the vertical equity of drivers with varying income levels, utilizing the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction process as an example. According to the research, loss-averse drivers are more than gain-neutral and gain-seeking drivers when the income levels of the drivers using reserved parking are the same. With the increasing number of high-income drivers involved in the parking reservation, medium to low-income drivers would lose their chances of successful reservations because of their uncompetitive bid price which leads to inequity issues when the number is less than the number of parking spaces. In contrast, the vertical equity index changes more for gain-seeking drivers while being generally steady when loss-averse and gain-neutral drivers participate. For instance, when the profit and loss coefficient is 3 and 15% of drivers with high-income levels use the parking reservation platform, the vertical equity index rises from 0.09128 to 0.45434. The reference price has a moderating influence on the vertical equity index when the number of driver participants at high-income levels remains constant. In general, within a reasonable range, the higher the reference price, the more equitable the parking reservation procedure and the lower the vertical equity index., Author(s): Rong Chen [1]; Ge Gao (corresponding author) [1]; Fahui Pan [1]; Shuo Liu [1]; Xinbo Mao [1] 1. Introduction The rate of urbanization has been accelerating as China's economy [...]

This research incorporated an auction mechanism into the vehicle routing problem with occasional drivers and produced simulations in an agent-based environment. Auctions were used to match online orders with potential occasional drivers. While a centralized system optimizes system performance under global objectives, the novel decentralized approach presented here illustrates emergent phenomena resulting from the interaction of individual entities in highly dynamic cases. In the simulations, the auctions were executed after a fixed time interval called a rolling time horizon. Our results suggest that the appropriate rolling time horizon produces a lower average unit compensation cost because better matches can be found when the accumulation of online orders and occasional drivers is maintained at a certain level. The simulation results also indicate that the use of an auction mechanism instead of simple nonauction rules can improve the average unit compensation cost by up to 25.1%., Author(s): Chung-Wei Shen (corresponding author) [1,2]; Che-Cheng Hsu [1]; Kuan-Hua Tseng [1] 1. Introduction E-retail, with its revolutionary business model, is radically changing the way people shop. One of the [...]

Double auction prediction markets have proven successful in large-scale applications such as elections and sporting events. Consequently, several large corporations have adopted these markets for smaller-scale internal applications where information may be complex and the number of traders is small. Using laboratory experiments, we test the performance of the double auction in complex environments with few traders and compare it to three alternative mechanisms. When information is complex we find that an iterated poll (or Delphi method) outperforms the double auction mechanism. We present five behavioral observations that may explain why the poll performs better in these settings. Key words: information aggregation; prediction markets; mechanism design History: Received July 23, 2009; accepted June 14, 2010, by Teck-Hua Ho, decision analysis. Published online in Articles in Advance October 11, 2010., 1. Introduction In large-scale applications, double auction prediction markets have proven successful at predicting future outcomes. The Iowa Electronic Market and the TradeSports-InTrade exchanges have outperformed national polls in predicting [...]

We develop a framework for the optimal bundling problem of a multiproduct monopolist, who provides goods to consumers with private valuations that are random draws from a distribution with heavy tails. We show that in the Vickrey auction setting, the buyers prefer separate provision of the goods to any bundles. We also provide a complete characterization of the optimal bundling strategies for a monopolist producer, who provides goods for profit-maximizing prices. For products with low marginal costs, the seller's optimal strategy is to provide goods separately when consumers' valuations are heavy-tailed and in a single bundle when valuations are thin-tailed. These conclusions are reversed for goods with high marginal costs. For simplicity, we use a specific class of independent and identically distributed random variables, but our results can be generalized to include dependence, skewness, and the case of nonidentical one-dimensional distributions. Key words: optimal bundling strategies; multiproduct monopolist; Vickrey auction; profit-maximizing prices; heavy-tailed valuations History: Received December 14, 2008; accepted July 21, 2010, by Jagmohan S. Raju, marketing. Published online in Articles in Advance October 11, 2010., 1. Introduction In December 2007, two tickets to a Led Zeppelin reunion concert in London were sold in a charity auction. The face value of the two tickets was in [...]

We study settings where a number of sellers simultaneously offer vertically differentiated Vickrey auctions for imperfect substitute goods to unit-demand buyers. Vertical differentiation can arise from differences in item quality, [...]

The seller's threshold price in name-your-own-price auctions varies over time. However, consumers must bid without knowing when these variations occur because the threshold price is unobservable to them. This paper uses an analytical model and laboratory auctions to explore how the frequency of changes in the threshold price impacts consumer bidding behavior in name-your-own-price auctions. In particular, we consider how the frequency of these expected changes affects the optimal pattern of bid sequences (e.g., strictly increasing over time or following a nonmonotonic pattern). We find that when the probability of a price change is moderate, consumers may have an incentive to use nonmonotonic bidding patterns. Rather than steadily increasing their bids over time, consumers will, at some point in the bid sequence, decrease their bid. However, when the expected probability of a price change is very low or very high, consumers do not have an incentive to use nonmonotonic bidding patterns. Interestingly impatient bidders are more likely to decrease their bids at some point in the bid sequence than patient bidders. Finally, we find that more frequent price changes may increase customer satisfaction. Key words: name-your-own-price channel; bidding; rational decision making; buyer impatience; Priceline History: Received April 3, 2008; accepted June 18, 2009, by Jagmohan S. Raju, marketing. Published online in Articles in Advance September 11, 2009., 1. Introduction The Internet allows companies to interact with customers in ways that may have been prohibitively costly using traditional channels. In particular, the Internet has facilitated the emergence of [...]

The dominant methods of selling public companies - simultaneous auctions and sequential sales mechanisms - are compared. Sellers prefer auctions because of higher profitability compared to the more efficient sequential mechanism.

INTRODUCTION Federal climate policy in the United States is now under serious discussion with several bills introduced in Congress in the past two years. Cap-and-trade appears to be the policy [...], This paper evaluates the costs to households of a carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]) cap-and-trade program. We find important variation in the distribution of costs of the policy across 11 regions of the country and across income deciles. The introduction of a price on C[O.sub.2] emissions is regressive, but this may be outweighed by the distributional effects of C[O.sub.2] emissions allowances. We evaluate five alternatives for returning any revenues from auctioning emissions allowances--three are progressive (expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and two cap-and-dividend approaches), while the others are either neutral (a reduction in payroll taxes) or amplify regressivity (a reduction in the income tax). Regional differences are most substantial for low-income households.

An important managerial question is the choice of the pricing rule. We study whether this choice depends on the uncertainty about the number of participating bidders by comparing expected revenues under discriminatory and uniform pricing within an auction model with affiliated values, stochastic number of bidders, and linear bidding strategies. We show that if uncertainty about the number of bidders is substantial, then the discriminatory pricing generates higher expected revenues than the uniform pricing. In particular, the first-price auction might generate higher revenues than the second-price auction. Therefore, uncertainty about the number of bidders is an important factor to consider when choosing the pricing rule. We also study whether eliminating this uncertainty, i.e., revealing the number of bidders, is in the seller's interests, and discuss the existence of an increasing symmetric equilibrium. Key words: discriminatory pricing; uniform pricing; auctions; demand uncertainty; stochastic number of bidders History: Accepted by David E. Bell, decision analysis; received February 22, 2007. This paper was with the authors 2 months for 2 revisions. Published online in Articles in Advance July 21, 2008., 1. Introduction The choice of the pricing rule is an important and complex managerial decision. The focus of this paper is on the effect of demand uncertainty, within an auction [...]

Registrars' offices at most universities face the daunting task of allocating course seats to students. Because demand exceeds supply for many courses, course allocation needs to be done equitably and [...]

In this paper, we consider a market in which a finite number of firms compete in prices for the incoming demand for service. Upon every customer arrival, an independent auctioneer gathers bids from each one of the competing queuing systems and assigns the incoming customer to the system that submitted the lowest bid. We provide a simple characterization of Markov Perfect equilibrium in terms of "indifference prices," i.e., price levels at which players are indifferent between committing available capacity or withholding it. We identify sufficient conditions for socially efficient performance in equilibrium. Index Terms--Auctions, dynamic games, Markov Perfect equilibrium (MPE), queuing systems.