Auction Research Articles

Factors affecting the sale price of bred heifers and bred beef cows sold through video auctions

The objective was to evaluate potential factors influencing sale price of bred heifers and bred cows sold through video auction. Data were available on 1,870 bred heifer lots sold on 168 video auction dates from 2010 through 2018 and 1,237 bred cow lots sold on 163 video auction dates from 2011 through 2018. Multiple regression models (one each for bred heifers and cows), using backward selection, were developed to determine factors influencing sale price. A P < 0.05 value maintained factors within each final model. Significant determinants of bred heifer and cow sale price included auction year, breed description, weight, region of origin, and weight variation within the lot. Bred heifers sold for similar prices in 2014 ($2,276/head) and 2015 ($2,193), but those prices were greater ( P < 0.05) than all other years (range: $1,086/head to $1,605/head). In 2014 and 2015, bred cows sold for similar prices ($2,159 and $2,174/head, respectively) but at prices greater ( P < 0.05) than all other years (range: $1,186/head to $1,494/head). Red Angus–sired lots of bred heifers and cows sold for the greatest ( P < 0.05) sale price ($1,643 and $1,752/head, respectively) compared with all other breed groups. Auction year, region of origin in the United States, weight, and other factors influenced sale price, suggesting buyers use several components of information at the time of purchase. Understanding factors influencing sale price of bred beef females will help sellers more effectively market females and producers make more informed investment decisions.

Classifying the Level of Bid Price Volatility Based on Machine Learning with Parameters from Bid Documents as Risk Factors

The purpose of this study is to classify the bid price volatility level with machine learning and parameters from bid documents as risk factors. To this end, we studied project-oriented risk factors affecting the bid price and pre-bid clarification document as the uncertainty of bid documents through preliminary research. The authors collected Caltrans’s bid summary and pre-bid clarification document from 2011–2018 as data samples. To train the classification model, the data were preprocessed to create a final dataset of 269 projects consisting of input and output parameters. The projects in which the bid inquiries were not resolved in the pre-bid clarification had higher bid averages and bid ranges than the risk-resolved projects. Besides this, regarding the two classification models with neural network (NN) algorithms, Model 2, which included the uncertainty in the bid documents as a parameter, predicted the bid average risk and bid range risk more accurately (52.5% and 72.5%, respectively) than Model 1 (26.4% and 23.3%, respectively). The accuracy of Model 2 was verified with 40 verification test datasets.

Make a promise: the valuation adjustment mechanism in Chinese private target acquisitions

The valuation adjustment mechanism (VAM) is a contingent-payment contractual arrangement used in the Chinese mergers and acquisitions (M&As) market. The ‘two-direction payment’ design of Chinese VAMs can reduce deal uncertainty and generate value, especially for poorly performing companies that can use VAM contracts to boost short-term performance. I find in this empirical investigation that acquirers applying VAM terms have significantly higher market returns after addressing endogeneity. I also document that poorly performing bidders sign larger VAM contracts, pay higher bid premiums and achieve higher operating performance, and which types of firms are more likely to adopt a VAM in transactions.

The benefits of a unit dose system in oral antibiotics dispensing: Azorean hospital pharmacists tackling the socioeconomic problem of leftovers in Portugal

In Portugal, oral antibiotics are usually dispensed in a predefined package size at the local community pharmacy. This rigid system can create inefficiencies (e.g. leftovers), since prescription regimens are flexible and sometimes the package does not correspond exactly to the prescribed treatment. To provide a solution to this problem, the Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo de Ponta Delgada (HDES) opened a Public Sales Unit (PSU) with a unit dose dispensing system of pharmaceuticals for its patients. The aim of this study was to characterize and evaluate the unit dose system for oral antibiotics dispensing at the HDES-PSU, and to extrapolate the results at the Portuguese nationwide level. Oral antibiotics dispensing dynamics at the HDES-PSU were examined over a period of 1 year. Dispensed prescriptions were analyzed, and relevant information was collected and entered into a digital database for analysis. To extrapolate results at a nationwide level, a database from Statistics Portugal was used. The results revealed that the 663 registered interventions provided overall savings of 3939 pharmaceutical units, corresponding to €1032.99. The Portuguese nationwide extrapolation indicated that a total of 276,833 pharmaceutical interventions could be registered, corresponding to 1,544,317 pharmaceutical units saved and to €434,085.85 in monetary savings. The present study provides insights into how a unit dose dispensing system can contribute to solving the socioeconomic problems raised by leftovers of oral antibiotics dispensing practices occurring in healthcare systems such as the Portuguese one.

AucSwap: A Vickrey auction modeled decentralized cross-blockchain asset transfer protocol

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, the cross-blockchain asset transfer has been in great demand. However, most existing cross-blockchain solutions encounter low efficiency problems due to the centralized features, unfriendly development environment, and difficulty in cooperation. This paper proposes an interaction protocol for secure and efficient cross-blockchain transfer process, wherein the cross-blockchain asset transfer is modeled as an auction process. We design our protocol by leveraging the atomic swap technology and Vickrey auction scheme to achieve efficient cross-blockchain asset transfer, without sacrificing the decentralized control. To achieve the transfer efficiency, we optimize the Vickrey auction scheme to share data within the auction and delivery process synchronously. This results in a efficient user information exchange. The experimental results show that not only can our protocol achieve compatibility, but it also incurs little communication overhead in high throughput. A cross-blockchain transfer process can be accomplished in average 4 rounds of interaction. The difference between the transaction completion time and the bid waiting time is less than 1 second. Besides, our protocol guarantees the exchange rate at a reasonable range. The ratio of the cross-blockchain exchange rate to the real exchange rate converges to 0.9 for approximately 200 participants. The transaction fee decreases sharply with the increase of the number of auction participants.

A Blockchain-based Iterative Double Auction Protocol Using Multiparty State Channels

Although the iterative double auction has been widely used in many different applications, one of the major problems in its current implementations is that they rely on a trusted third party to handle the auction process. This imposes the risk of single point of failures, monopoly, and bribery. In this article, we aim to tackle this problem by proposing a novel decentralized and trustless framework for iterative double auction based on blockchain. Our design adopts the smart contract and state channel technologies to enable a double auction process among parties that do not need to trust each other, while minimizing the blockchain transactions. In specific, we propose an extension to the original concept of state channels that can support multiparty computation. Then, we provide a formal development of the proposed framework and prove the security of our design against adversaries. Finally, we develop a proof-of-concept implementation of our framework using Elixir and Solidity, on which we conduct various experiments to demonstrate its feasibility and practicality.

Government Land Supply and Housing Prices in Hong Kong: The Political Economy of Urban Land Policy

With the government owning all land in Hong Kong, public land sales have been an important channel for developers to acquire land for property development, apart from private-led urban regeneration. For the colonial time before 1997, land was supplied to the market via a supply-oriented model, in which the government determined how much land to sell and when. The situation changed in 1997 when the administration found that they were being unresponsive to market conditions, and switched to a demand-oriented model that allowed developers to reveal their demand for land. In any case, there is a general expectation in the society that government urban land policy in supplying land plays a pivotal role in making housing affordable by the general working class. By applying a modified Granger Causality test, we find this expectation unrealistic as there is no evidence supporting the claim that changing the quantity of land supply via government land sales would impact housing prices, even when the demand-oriented model was used. This suggests that changing the model per se did not solve the affordability problem. Further analysis based on other sources of land supply reveals that land sales are too trivial to have any observable impact on the housing market. Yet, the political economy of the urban land market prohibits the government from selling more land to build housing, as most of the land she owns has no or restricted development rights.

Determinants of Nonpaying Bid Behavior in Online Auction Platforms

The auction process can be divided into the auctioning, bidding, winning, and paying stages. Nonpaying bid behavior is a critical issue underlying the customer-to-customer (C2C) business model. This paper proposes and examines a research model that describes nonpaying bid behavior by concisely considering technological (platform quality), psychological (perceived risk), and individual (impulse buying inclination) aspects. The moderation effect of interaction–risk (combined interaction quality and perceived risk) on nonpaying attitude is investigated along with the influence of gender on such moderation effect. The proposed research model is examined by performing an empirical quantitative survey among users of a C2C auction platform. Based on data collected from 303 valid samples, results show that impulsive bidding inclination (individual aspect) and interaction quality (psychological aspect) are significantly associated with nonpaying bid behavior. Meanwhile, platform quality (technological aspect) and perceived risk (psychological aspect) are unlikely to determine nonpaying bid behaviors at the bid-paying stage. The moderation effect is significant, whereas the gender effect is insignificant. The managerial implications of these findings are also discussed along with some suggestions. This research highlights the value of modeling nonpaying bid behavior for C2C auction platforms.

A Study on Court Auction System using Ethereum-based Ether

A Study on Court Auction System using Ethereum-based Ether

Auction based Energy-Efficient Cooperative Relay Scheduling in Bidirectional Highway Scenarios for VANET

In a Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET), Road Side Units (RSUs) deployed along the highways are generally dispossessed from a permanent connection to grid-power and mostly the RSU operations are sustainable on alternative sources such as solar power, wind power, etc. The power consumption of RSU is dominated by the downlink (RSU-to-vehicle) communication cost and it is a function of RSU to vehicle distance. Moreover, the RSUs cannot cover entire highway segment due to high deployment cost and they leave an outage area in between neighboring RSUs. In this case, a target vehicle entering into an outage area with unserved requests can be served by selecting relay (store-carry-forward) vehicles. This paper proposes RSU assisted relay scheduling algorithm for faster data retrieval to the target vehicle while minimizing the RSU energy consumption. Firstly, a time slot based relay scheduling problem is formulated and then the NP-hardness of the problem is proved. Secondly, a greedy algorithm (GA) and a forward relay scheduler (FRS) are proposed to schedule the relay vehicles in forward direction (i.e. target moving direction). The GA selects the relay vehicles which are near to RSU and takes less time to reach the target vehicle. The FRS apply the concepts of Auction Theory to optimally assign the relay vehicles to time slots, that can jointly minimize RSU energy consumption and end-to-end delay to the target vehicle. Here, the Auction process allows the relay vehicles to bid for time slots by using their local information such as speed, location, cooperative cache size, direction, etc. Furthermore, the proposed Auction based RSU assisted relay scheduling (RRS) triggers the neighboring RSUs which can cooperate by sharing unserved data and schedule the relay vehicles driving in both forward and backward (i.e. opposite to target) directions in a bidirectional highway. Simulation results show that the efficacy of the proposed algorithms over other relay scheduling algorithms with respect to energy consumption, end-to-end delay and residual data delivery.

Auctions 2020

Auctions 2020

Detecting Bid-Rigging in Public Procurement. A Cluster Analysis Approach

This paper analyses the public procurement auctions for snow removal contracts to find out whether bid-rigging occurred. Due to the limited participation in the auction processes, detection of anticompetitive agreements was possible. The econometric analysis used in our study supported the findings of a cartel agreement. Cluster analysis, statistical hypothesis, normality and symmetry and nonparametric tests reveal two types of auctions: competitive and noncompetitive bids. The aim of this paper is to analyze the public procurement auctions with nonparametric statistical methods. Our findings are in line with the literature in the field.

Talking about How to Do Well in the Compilation of the Highest Bid Price Limit of Electric Power Engineering

Talking about How to Do Well in the Compilation of the Highest Bid Price Limit of Electric Power Engineering

Reliable Traffic Monitoring Mechanisms Based on Blockchain in Vehicular Networks

Real-time traffic monitoring is a fundamental mission in a smart city to understand traffic conditions and avoid dangerous accidents. In this article, we propose a reliable and efficient traffic monitoring system that integrates blockchain and the Internet of Vehicles technologies effectively. It can crowdsource its tasks of traffic information collection to vehicles that run on the road instead of installing cameras in every corner. First, we design a lightweight blockchain-based information trading framework to model the interactions between traffic administration and vehicles. It guarantees reliability, efficiency, and security during executing trading. Second, we define the utility functions for the entities in this system and come up with a budgeted auction mechanism that motivates vehicles to undertake the collection tasks actively. In our algorithm, it not only ensures that the total payment to the selected vehicles does not exceed a given budget but also maintains the truthfulness of the auction process that prevents some vehicles from offering unreal bids for getting greater utilities. Finally, we conduct a group of numerical simulations to evaluate the reliability of our trading framework and performance of our algorithms, whose results demonstrate their correctness and efficiency perfectly.

Study of the quality and safety of microbiological bioformulations for plant protection and growth stimulation

Bioformulations containing microorganisms that have various useful properties for plants are widely used as an alternative to chemical pesticides. Methods for evaluating the quality of such biological products have not yet been standardized. Composition of bioformulations used for protecting plants and stimulating plant growth was studied with molecular methods. Toxicity of bioformulations was evaluated on laboratory populations of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris L.). The number of bacteria in the two bioformulations was significantly less than the manufacturer’s stated. The declared composition of microorganisms in 33% of bioformulations did not fully or partially correspond to the identified composition. Klebsiella sp. and Citrobacter sp. bacteria were found among non-target bacteria. It is known that some species of these bacteria genera are opportunistic for humans. Not one of the studied bioformulations did not cause the death of bumblebees. However, it was found that 5 bioformulations out of 18 reduced the flight activity of bumblebees, which indicates their toxic effect. The data obtained by us shows that it is necessary to develop standardized methods for assessing the quality and safety of microbiological bioformulations that are available for public sale.

Legal Relations when Real Estate that is not Owned by the Debtor is Sold at an Auction

Legal Relations when Real Estate that is not Owned by the Debtor is Sold at an Auction

A secure and privacy-preserving protocol for holding double auctions in smart grid

One of the most used types of auctions in the smart grid is the double auction, in which both buyers and sellers can respectively submit their bids and asks to participate in the auction. In recent years, many schemes have been designed to propose a double auction mechanism for the smart grids; however, few of these schemes consider the information security aspects and users’ privacy. In this paper, we propose a protocol that helps different double auction mechanisms be implemented securely in the smart grids. This protocol not only can satisfy the security requirements of a double auction scheme but is also compatible with the smart grid technologies. In this scheme, in order to preserve the users’ anonymity and privacy, a pseudo-identity is assigned to each participant, and the bids/asks are encrypted using the Paillier cryptosystem. By virtue of the Pedersen commitment scheme used in this paper, the participants can be verified as having correctly and honestly followed the auction protocol. Moreover, the theoretical analysis and implementation results show that the proposed scheme can be considered as an efficient scheme for the smart grid entities involved in the auction process.

Opening Bid Strategies in English Auctions

Existing residential homes in Norway are sold by English auctions. This provides an exclusive opportunity to examine opening bid strategies for high-valued objects. Using unique data from surveys and auction journals, we find that the direct price effect of a high opening bid is stronger than the intimidation effect. A higher opening bid is associated with an overall higher price premium in OLS and fixed-effects regressions. Our results have implications for both buyers and sellers in situations where auctions and auction-like sales mechanisms are used, and for policy makers regarding auction process rules and market regulations.

E&amp;P Notes (January 2021)

E&amp;P Notes (January 2021)

Auctioning Annuities

Auctioning Annuities