Bid Amount Research Articles

CHOOSING AN APPROPRIATE CONTINGENCY SUM ESTIMATING METHODS FOR HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS IN NIGERIA: A LITERATURE REVIEW

In order to establish a gap to be filled in a particular field, there is a need to gather information that allows the researcher to identify and analyse the current state of researches on the topic. Contingency sum estimation for projects plays an important role for inclusion for risk taken by the contractor on the bid amount. This is good in order to meet project objectives (cost, time, quality, health and safety, and environment). The main function of contingency sum is to cater forvariations that arise during the construction phase of projects. The aim of the study is to identifying and examine the various methods for estimating contingency sum for projects with a view to propose an appropriate method which will be suitable for a specific project in order to increase accuracy and reduce cost overrun. A literature review of selected papers (journals, conference proceedings and theses) on contingency estimation was carried out. The major findings from this study is that most studies were carried out on building projects while few were carried out on highway projects. From the analysis carried out, no single method of estimating has been effective for all types of projects. These methods of estimating contingency sums have developed over the years as a result of shortcomings of one method after the other. It is therefore recommended that peculiarity of each project, ease of using each of the methods and accuracy of the estimates needed should be the basis of choosing method of estimating contingency sum.

Estimating the value of the World Heritage Site designation: a case study from Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park, Nepal

ABSTRACT This paper estimates the economic value of World Heritage Site (WHS) designation for the Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park, Nepal. In 2012, entrance fees were $30 per international visitor; lower fees apply to South Asian visitors, and no fees to domestic visitors. We surveyed 522 international visitors to the Park in 2011 to elicit their willingness to pay (WTP) for access, using the contingent valuation method. Logistic regression results show that bid amounts, gender, age, educational attainment, use of a guide, length of stay in the park, information about park substitutes, and knowledge about the park's WHS designation predicted visitors’ WTP decisions. The median WTP amount was US$90.93 per trip; 63.8% of visitors were willing to pay more than the existing entry fee. The revenue maximizing entry fee was $80 per trip. Knowledge about the park's WHS designation prior to their trip contributed $16.39 to the median WTP: better marketing of the site's WHS status could add up to US$ 566, 619 to the site's annual income. Given that many protected areas now suffer falling public sector financial help, accurate knowledge of WTP is increasingly key to supporting sustainable management in WHS sites, and in justifying tourism to them.

A Comparison of Bidding Strategies for Online Auctions Using Fuzzy Reasoning and Negotiation Decision Functions

Bidders often feel challenged when looking for the best bidding strategies to excel in the competitive environment of multiple and simultaneous online auctions for same or similar items. Bidders face complicated issues for deciding which auction to participate in, whether to bid early or late, and how much to bid. In this paper, we present the design of bidding strategies, which aim to forecast the bid amounts for buyers at a particular moment in time based on their bidding behavior and their valuation of an auctioned item. The agent develops a comprehensive methodology for final price estimation, which designs bidding strategies to address buyers’ different bidding behaviors using two approaches: Mamdani method with regression analysis and negotiation decision functions. The experimental results show that the agents who follow fuzzy reasoning with a regression approach outperform other existing agents in most settings in terms of their success rate and expected utility.

International Real Estate Review

This study examines whether the reserve prices in court auctions of residential real estate in Seoul, Korea result in reference price effects by influencing the amount of the successful bid. We also explore whether the sensitivity of these reference price effects differ with housing size and assess whether the expected rate of the selling price can be predicted based on the different reserve price levels. The panel data estimates presented herein show that reserve prices positively influence the final property transfer prices; in other words, the reserve prices yield strong reference price effects. The results of the ordinary least square regressions show that the sensitivity of the reference price effects differs with housing size, albeit in an inconsistent manner. Finally, the response surface methodology analysis indicates * Corresponding author 76 No, Kim and Yu that different reserve prices lead to different reference price effects with locality across the Seoul metropolitan area. The study thus provides courts and bidders with the means to predict the potential rate of the selling price, which will be useful for decision making in auctions.

Large all-pay auctions with IPV bidders

This note analyzes different types of all-pay auctions when the number of bidders becomes large. We compute the distributions of the highest bids for the first-price all pay auction and we show that the expected payment made by the winning bidder converges to half of the total payments. In the second-price all-pay auction (the war of attrition), the highest bid amounts to about 35.5% of the total revenues. We also compute the payments for all-pay auctions with multiple prizes.

Respondent Uncertainty and Ordering Effect on Willingness to Pay for Salt Marsh Conservation in the Brest Roadstead (France)

This paper explores the potential link between the sensitivity of willingness to pay (WTP) to the order of presenting bid amounts in contingent valuation questions (ordering effect) and respondent uncertainty. The resource being valued is a public project to protect salt marshes against the spread of an invasive aquatic plant in the Brest roadstead (France). Valuation uncertainty is captured through a variant of payment card format where respondents are given the opportunity to report their WTP as either a single value (Option A) or an interval of values (Option B). The ordering effect is tested using both parametric models that ignore and control for the potential sample selection bias related to the choice between Option A and Option B, as well as non-parametric models. The results suggest that (1) respondents place substantial WTP values on salt marsh conservation, and (2) the ordering effect is linked to respondent uncertainty since only uncertain respondents react differently to changes in the order of presenting bid amounts. Specifically, for uncertain respondents, putting bid amounts in ascending order yields lower welfare estimates than putting bid amounts in descending order or random order. Policy recommendations and options to deal with ordering effect are discussed.

Paid Search Advertising

This note provides a primer on paid search advertising, which is an important component of digital marketing. The mechanics of paid search is explained using the Google search engine platform. The note covers metrics for evaluating the performance of paid search, the strategic objective of paid search, the relationship between customer lifetime value and search ads, how to overcome sparse data problems using keyword clouds, and the nature of Google AdWords's enhanced campaigns. Excerpt UVA-M-0860 Rev. May 3, 2018 Paid Search Advertising You're in the market for a baseball cap, an espresso maker, and a Ferrari F430 (lucky you). You decide you'd like to purchase each of the items in an online auction. You'd like to pay $ 10 for the hat, $ 1,000 for the coffee maker, and $ 150,000 for the Ferrari, so you set aside $ 151,010 to make sure you land your items. Without understanding the nuances of the bidding structure, you decide to take an average of your total budget and allocate that as your bid amount on each item—$ 50,336.67 for the hat, $ 50,336.67 for the espresso maker, and $ 50,336.67 for the Ferrari. Much to your dismay, you later learn you've won the auctions for the hat and espresso machine but missed out on the Ferrari. As ridiculous as the strategy sounds, this is what can happen when businesses run paid search advertising campaigns without trying to optimize or target their efforts to the business context and nuances of the system at hand. . . .

Modeling Contractor's Bidding Decisions

Experience and business intuition of a contractor are often insufficient to ensure that tender procedures will provide a good trade-off between the cost of bid preparation and the benefit of a high probability of winning a money-making contract. The authors put forward a set of decision-support models: a multi-criteria analysis for assessing the desirability of a potential new contract, and two linear programming models: one for calculating the total price, and the other for distributing the bid amount among the items of the bill of quantities to maximize the contractor's cash flows. Application of the models is illustrated with a numerical example.

Role of Tourism in the Economic Development of Nilgiris

Tourism plays an important role in the economic development of any region. Majority of the writers on Tourism are having the opinion that tourism can make a positive contribution for economic development of the state. This paper aims to limelight the economic development of Nilgiris district through the movement of tourists. It also explores the impact of tourism on the agricultural economy of Nilgiris; impact of hotel industries and income to the travel agencies on tourism. The study also analyses the economic development of shop keepers, economic promotion through its places of attraction and its economic development through transport. The inflow of tourists is high enough to get a high annual bid amount from tollgates entry points in Nilgiris. The government is getting a respectable amount of tax collection through the tourism in Nilgiris.

Dynamic changes in the main regulatory genes of mitochondrial permeability transition pore in Eimeria tenella host cells

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the dynamic changes in the main regulatory genes of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore in E. tenella host cells. Primary chick embryo cecum epithelial cell culture techniques, spectrophotometer technology, Hoechst-Annexin V-PI apoptosis staining and ELISA were used to detect the apoptosis rate and dynamic changes of Bcl-2, Bcl-xl, Bax, Bak, Bid, Bad, HK-II, and ATP content in E. tenella host cells at 4, 24, 48, 72, 96, and 120 h. The rates of early apoptosis, late apoptosis, and necrosis of group T0 were significantly lower (P < 0.05) or highly significantly lower (P < 0.01) than those of group C at 4 h, but higher (P < 0.05 or P < 0.01) at varying degrees than those of the same group at 24–120 h. Compared to group C, the amount of Bcl-2, ATP, Bax and Bad in group T0 were visibly lower (P < 0.05 or P < 0.01) at 4 h, whereas Bcl-xl/Bax was highly significantly higher (P < 0.01) at 4 h. In addition, group T0 had less ATP at 24–120 h than group C, whereas the amount of Bcl-2, Bcl-xl, Bax, Bak, Bid, Bad and HK-II in group T0 inversely increased in varying degrees at 24–120 h compared with group C. Moreover, Bcl-2/Bax was lower (P < 0.01) at 24, 48, and 96 h, and Bcl-xl/Bax was lower (P < 0.05) at 48 h in group T0 than in group C, respectively. Taken together, these observations indicate that in the early developmental stages of E. tenella, the host-cell apoptosis rate decreased; although the amount of anti- and pro-apoptotic genes in host cells decreased, the ratios of anti-apoptotic to pro-apoptotic bcl-2 gene-family members increased. In the middle and later developmental stages of E. tenella, the host-cell apoptosis rate increased; the amount of anti- and pro-apoptotic genes increased, while the ratios of anti-apoptotic to pro-apoptotic bcl-2 gene-family members decreased. In addition, ATP decreased at all developmental stages of E. tenella.

Are investors rational or perceptual in P2P lending?

This paper addresses the research on investor decision-making behaviors in peer-to-peer (P2P) lending from the perspective of rationality and sensibility not only to more thoroughly examine the factors affecting P2P lending but also to contribute to P2P platform builders' and investees' knowledge. We test investors' rational choice behaviors using indices such as interest rates and investees' monthly income and test perceptual choice using the identifiable victim effect. These tests attempt to determine whether investors prefer identifiable investees and whether this identification, as measured by social distance, affects the amount of investment. The panel data collected through the experiments are used to construct Probit and Tobit models, which address a combination of rationality and sensibility. The empirical results show that investors prefer large, short-term, high-interest loans and that investors are more likely to bid for such loans. In addition, investees find it easier to obtain funding when they share similar characteristics--in particular, a birthplace, location or ethnicity--with investors. Moreover, investees find it easier to obtain more funding when they share a similar birthplace, location or occupation with investors, whereas investees with an "identifiable" educational background find securing more funding to be more difficult. Furthermore, for a specific bidding amount, there are substitution effects between occupation and location, occupation and ethnicity, birthplace and education, and birthplace and age, which make it disadvantageous to increase the similarities across those dimensions. Finally, there are complementary effects between education and occupation and between education and age. However, there is an inverted-U relationship between social distance and bidding amount that determines whether rationality or sensibility dominate investors' decisions.

Economic Valuation of Forest Conserved by Local Community for Carbon Sequestration: The Case of Humbo Community Assisted Natural Regeneration Afforestation/Reforestation (A/R) Carbon Sequestration Project; SNNPRS, Ethiopia

The study was carried out to determine the economic value of forest conserved by local community for carbon sequestration in the Humbo District, Ethiopia. The contingent valuation method (CVM) using the double bounded bivariate probit econometric method was employed to estimate WTP for sustainable forest management. Household survey was randomly conducted in 218 respondents purposively selected from three forest development cooperatives. The bivariate probit model was run to estimate mean WTP and to identify the determinant factors for farmers’ WTP for forest conservation. Thus, the mean WTP with covariates was estimated to be 104.38 Ethiopian Birr (ETB) and 55.73 ETB1 per year for the initial bid and for the follow-up bid amount, respectively. The result also indicated that respondents’ level of education, marital status, years of membership in the cooperatives, second bid amount, distance of residence from forest of interest, and net family income were significantly related to WTP for forest conservation. The study showed that even the poor households were willing to pay the average values in terms of cash contribution to maintain the forest management responsibility following the withdrawal of the NGO. In conclusion, whereas CVM can be applied to determine WTP for forest conservation, local people recognize and give value to the environmental services of the forest and are willing to maintain those benefits. The study also indicates the potential for sustainable forest management through community-based approach.

Assessment of Willingness to Pay as a Source of Financing for the Sustainable Development of Barobbob Watershed in Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines

This study employed the Contingent Valuation Method to assess the willingness to pay of water users, as a source of financing for the sustainable development of Barobbob Watershed. The WTP study was conducted among 345 waters users in 19 barangays in the municipalities of Solano and Bayombong. Uncensored data revealed that 63.8% (58.84% for the adjusted) of the respondents revealed willingness to pay for improved watershed management. The mean WTP amount, estimated through a logit model, Turnbull Distributor-Free Estimator and Lower Bound Estimate, is found to be PhP39.35, PhP27.80 and PhP25.90/month/household, respectively. Respondents WTP is influenced by bid amount, age, membership in environmental organization, experience with water-related problems, civil status, house ownership, and awareness on the concept of watershed. Respondents were willing to pay because they wanted a sustainable water supply for the present and future generations. A payment scheme is possible and it could provide a sustainable flow of fund, however, the willingness percentages still needed to be increased. Community education and public awareness (CEPA) campaign is necessary to enhance the water users’ knowledge and understand about the importance and values of watersheds. Ultimately, WTP percentage and WTP amounts would increase.

Hyperosmotic Shock Engages Two Positive Feedback Loops through Caspase-3-dependent Proteolysis of JNK1-2 and Bid

Hyperosmotic shock induces early calpain activation, Smac/DIABLO release from the mitochondria, and p38/JNK activation in Xenopus oocytes. These pathways regulate late cytochrome c release and caspase-3 activation. Here, we show that JNK1-1 and JNK1-2 are activated early by osmostress, and sustained activation of both isoforms accelerates the apoptotic program. When caspase-3 is activated, JNK1-2 is proteolyzed at Asp-385 increasing the release of cytochrome c and caspase-3 activity, thereby creating a positive feedback loop. Expression of Bcl-xL markedly reduces hyperosmotic shock-induced apoptosis. In contrast, expression of Bid induces rapid caspase-3 activation, even in the absence of osmostress, which is blocked by Bcl-xL co-expression. In these conditions a significant amount of Bid in the cytosol is mono- and bi-ubiquitinated. Caspase-3 activation by hyperosmotic shock induces proteolysis of Bid and mono-ubiquitinated Bid at Asp-52 increasing the release of cytochrome c and caspase-3 activation, and thus creating a second positive feedback loop. Revealing the JNK isoforms and the loops activated by osmostress could help to design better treatments for human diseases caused by perturbations in fluid osmolarity.

Bidding for private finance initiative projects: an analysis

Purpose – This paper aims to present a positive analysis of the bidding process for private finance initiative (PFI) projects. The analysis attempts to unravel how value for money (VFM) changes in the bidding process and what factors influence this change. Bidding theory postulates that the winning bid price drops from the effect of competition when the number of bid-participating firms increases. Design/methodology/approach – An instrumental variable analysis was conducted using a two-stage least-squares method to remove the influence of endogeneity in the number of bid participants, which, according to prior research and surveys of business operators, possibly explains some of the VFM change. The results were considered robust because no observable change was found in the positive effect of the number of participant firms. Findings – This paper provides positive evidence of the relationship between the number of firms and the bidding result. The analysis shows that the number of bid-participating firms clearly has a significant positive effect on VFM change. Specifically, competition lowers the winning bid amount in line with the theoretical proposition. Originality/value – This study confirms previous research based on bidding data of Japanese PFI projects, a segment not sufficiently researched so far. Further, increasing the number of participant firms, up to a maximum of six, is shown to raise the VFM, a result consistent with the fact that five major construction companies play a leading role in Japanese PFI projects.

Analysis of Factors that Influence the Willingness to Pay for Irrigation Water in the Kurdistan Regional Government, Iraq

Water availability has become a problem in many countries of the world. Water scarcity can be economic or physical. Agricultural water use accounts for about three quarters of total global consumption; in many developing countries, irrigation represents over 90% of the water used. The purpose of this paper is to explore the willingness to pay for irrigation water among the farmers from the boundaries governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). During the field study, 236 farmers from KRG were interviewed. The collected data were analyzed for each of the precipitation zones of the area (secured (A) and non-secured rainfed (B)). The contingent valuation method was used to determine the willingness to pay for irrigation water. The following possible independent variables influencing farmers’ decisions were considered: the bid amounts; evaluation scale of the water deficit; source of water for irrigation; cultivated area; education and age of respondents; main agricultural activity. In Zone A, the median willingness to pay of the farmers that used ground water for irrigation is 20.28 USD/10 m3, and for the farmers that use other sources of water, the willingness to pay is 11.49 USD/10 m3. The median willingness to pay in Zone B is 18.56/10 m3.

The Effects of Bid Pulsing on Keyword Performance in Search Engines

ABSTRACTThe objective of this study is to empirically examine whether and how bid pulsing affects keyword auction performance in search engine advertising. In keyword auctions, advertisers can choose a “set and forget” fixed bidding amount (fixed bidding), or they can change the bid value based on certain types of rules (pulse bidding). A keyword auction data set from Yahoo! reveals that around 60 percent of advertisers frequently changed their bid value for a particular keyword category; moreover, such pulse-bidding behavior is observed throughout the entire time course for some companies. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses on this data set demonstrate that when a company pulses its bid values, the ranking, the number of exposures, and the number of clicks of the target ad listing will all benefit; in addition, the average bid price will be lower. The results are consistent across four keyword categories. Among the three keyword categories that are in ascending order of level of competitiveness,the magnitude of the pulse-bidding effect also increases. The study extends search engine advertising literature by providing empirical evidence of pulse-bidding strategy under the generalized second price auction and by exploring the consequence of such strategy. Managerially, our results suggest that, keeping all other costs and the bidding environment the same, increasing the frequency and scale of bid pulsing will improve keyword performance; this is especially the case when bidding on a highly competitive keyword category.

Competition and Coalition Formation of Renewable Power Producers

We investigate group formations and strategic behaviors of renewable power producers in electricity markets. These producers currently bid into the day-ahead market in a conservative fashion because of the real-time risk associated with not meeting their bid amount. It has been suggested in the literature that producers would bid less conservatively if they can form large groups to take advantages of spatial diversity to reduce the uncertainty in their aggregate output. We show that large groups of renewable producers would act strategically to lower the aggregate output because of market power. To maximize renewable power production, we characterize the trade-off between market power and generation uncertainty as a function of the size of the groups. We show there is a sweet spot in the sense that there exists groups that are large enough to achieve the uncertainty reduction of the grand coalition, but are small enough such that they have no significant market power. We consider both independent and correlated forecast errors under a fixed real-time penalty. We also consider a real-time market where both selling and buying of energy are allowed. We validate our claims using PJM and NREL data.

Processing Shotgun Proteomics Data on the Amazon Cloud with the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline

Cloud computing, where scalable, on-demand compute cycles and storage are available as a service, has the potential to accelerate mass spectrometry-based proteomics research by providing simple, expandable, and affordable large-scale computing to all laboratories regardless of location or information technology expertise. We present new cloud computing functionality for the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline, a free and open-source suite of tools for the processing and analysis of tandem mass spectrometry datasets. Enabled with Amazon Web Services cloud computing, the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline now accesses large scale computing resources, limited only by the available Amazon Web Services infrastructure, for all users. The Trans-Proteomic Pipeline runs in an environment fully hosted on Amazon Web Services, where all software and data reside on cloud resources to tackle large search studies. In addition, it can also be run on a local computer with computationally intensive tasks launched onto the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service to greatly decrease analysis times. We describe the new Trans-Proteomic Pipeline cloud service components, compare the relative performance and costs of various Elastic Compute Cloud service instance types, and present on-line tutorials that enable users to learn how to deploy cloud computing technology rapidly with the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline. We provide tools for estimating the necessary computing resources and costs given the scale of a job and demonstrate the use of cloud enabled Trans-Proteomic Pipeline by performing over 1100 tandem mass spectrometry files through four proteomic search engines in 9 h and at a very low cost.

The resolution of failed banks during the crisis: Acquirer performance and FDIC guarantees, 2008–2013

Abstract We find that winning bidders in FDIC failed bank auctions from 2008 to 2013 experience substantial positive abnormal stock returns. Returns are inversely related to bid amounts after controlling for bid determinants, consistent with wealth transfers from the FDIC providing implicit subsidies to acquirers. The results challenge arguments that wealth transfers in earlier crises stemmed from since-eliminated bidding restrictions, but support the prediction of cash-in-the-market pricing theory that during crises, resolution through acquisition requires subsidization. Winning bid amounts are related to proxies for cash-in-the-market pricing. FDIC loss sharing, not widely used before the recent failure wave, is an important influence on bids.