Em diversos mercados de energia onde há competição, a formação de preços de energia elétrica no mercado de curto prazo decorre do equilíbrio da oferta e da demanda, onde geradores e grandes consumidores informam, em periodicidade horária ou inferior, as quantidades de energia e preços associados aos quais estão dispostos a produzir e consumir, respectivamente. No Brasil, no entanto, a demanda utilizada no modelo de formação de preço de energia elétrica no curto prazo (PLD) é considerada inelástica em relação ao preço. Por mais que se possam constatar sinais de resposta da demanda frente à volatilidade do PLD, ou ao custo com uso da rede de transmissão e distribuição no período de ponta, não há mecanismo estabelecido para que os consumidores ofertem as quantidades de energia e preços aos quais estão dispostos a reduzir seu consumo. O presente trabalho tem o objetivo de apresentar proposta de alteração no processo de formação de preço no curto prazo de modo a permitir a Oferta da Redução do Consumo (ORC) pelos consumidores industriais. A proposta parte da representação do parque termelétrico atual, que serve de base para o valor da oferta de redução do consumo, as adaptações para introdução da curva de operação para fins de consideração da redução de consumo, bem como metodologia para aferição do montante de energia efetivamente reduzido. Além disso, de modo a apresentar o potencial benefício sistêmico com a introdução da proposta, são apresentadas simulações com a cadeia de modelos de formação de preço atual tendo como base a indústria de alumínio no Brasil. Os cenários de ORC da indústria levam em consideração parâmetros econômicos que asseguram a atratividade do negócio em consonância com o benefício sistêmico de redução do custo de operação. Apresenta-se ainda simulação da operação do ano de 2015 com estimativa do potencial de ORC no Ambiente de Contratação Livre (ACL) onde se constatou reduções de até 25% no Custo Marginal de Operação (CMO) e 16% de redução despacho termelétrico. / In several competitive power markets, short term power price is the result of the balance of supply and demand represented by bid and ask prices and energy quantities. In Brazil, short term power price (PLD) calculated by Newave/Decomp price models consider price-inflexible demand, even though traces of demand response to short term power prices and demand tariffs can be identified. The purpose of this Thesis is the proposal of changes in process of power pricing allowing large energy consumers bid their price to curtail their consumption in substitution of thermal power dispatch. Topics included in proposal are: cost of installed thermal power plants in power system, industrial demand curtail and restart features, and demand response effectiveness appraisal tools. Current power price models were employed on simulations to evaluate system\'s benefits with demand response. From an industrial perspective, accounting measures were basis to convert loss of production in demand-side bidding price in order to keep business profitability. Estimate of demand side bidding potential market in Brazilian free market with simulation of system impact in 2015 with results that reached 25% of Marginal Cost reduction and 16% of Thermal Dispatch reduction.

Online auctions are arguably one of the most important and distinctly new applications of the internet. The predominant player in online auctions, eBay, has over 18.9 milllion users, and it was the host of over $5 billion worth of goods sold in the year 2000. Using methods from approximate dynamic programming and integer programming, we design algorithms for optimally bidding for a single item online auction, and simultaneous or overlapping multiple online auctions. We report computational evidence using data from eBay's web site from 1772 completed auctions for personal digital assistants and from 4208 completed auctions for stamp collections that show that (a) the optimal dynamic strategy outperforms simple but widely used static heuristic rules for a single auction, and (b) a new approach combining the value functions of single auctions found by dynamic programming using an integer programming framework produces high quality solutions fast and reliably. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Thesis is to Introduce an Intelligent cross platform architecture with Multi-agent system in order to equip the simulation Models with agents, having intelligent behavior, reactive and pro-active nature and rational in decision making.

I denna rapport redovisas för förmedlingsprocessen för småhus med typkod 220 och samtliga moment som ingår från början till genomfört uppdrag. Fokus har riktats på att identifiera förbättringsområden och därigenom hitta åtgärdsförslag. Rapporten skall syfta till att fungera som ett stöd och vara ett vägledande hjälpmedel för såväl fastighetsmäklare som privatpersoner i sin roll som säljare och köpare. Litteraturstudier och handledning har legat till grund för den processkarta som upprättats och illustrerats. Utifrån denna har en förstudie gjorts genom intervjuer med fem verksamma fastighetsmäklare på Fastighetsbyrån i Alingsås. Därefter genomfördes djupintervjuer med tre slumpvis utvalda fastighetsmäklare på olika orter och kontor, för att identifiera problemområden. Varje moment i processen har beskrivits i text för att ge en bättre förståelse för kartans innebörd. Vidare diskussion och analys har resulterat till förslag på förbättringsåtgärder inom förmedlingsprocessen. Resultatet redovisar att majoriteten av de intervjuade fastighetsmäklarna har upplevt att moment och arbetssätt inom förmedlingsprocessen till viss grad går att förbättra. Därtill kan det konstateras att förmedlingsprocessen skiljer sig i både utförande och tid beroende på om försäljningen görs i en storstad eller på en mindre ort. Majoriteten av de intervjuade fastighetsmäklarna pekar särskilt på vikten av att skapa och upprätthålla goda relationer med samarbetspartners och kollegor i branschen. Detta anses vara av väsentlig betydelse för att affärer som är beroende av en tredje part ska fortgå med så få hinder som möjligt. Det kan även konstateras att flera av de problemställningar som framkommit beror på externa makrofaktorer som fastighetsmäklaren själv inte kan påverka. Omständigheter som berör världsekonomin, ränteläget, ställningen på fastighetsmarknaden, medias spekulationer, lagar och förordningar utgör faktorer utom fastighetsmäklarens kontroll. Vidare kan det fastställas att den nya fastighetsmäklarlag som trädde i kraft den 1 juli 2011 har bidragit till att flera tidigare problem redan bearbetats och ändrats. Detta projekt har verkat för att lyfta fram ytterligare några moment där åtgärder skulle kunna underlätta arbetsgången för fastighetsmäklare, bland annat genom ett informationsblad till spekulant. / This report describes the sales process of type code 220 single-family homes, including necessary procedural steps. The focus of the report is to identify key areas needing improvement in order to ascertain potential solutions. The report is intended to act as both a support mechanism and a guide for real estate agents and private individuals in their roles as buyers and sellers. A process-map was developed based on research and guidance, and is described within the report. Problem areas were identified using the process-map during comprehensive interviews, and every step in the process is explained in detail in order to illustrate the process-map’s purpose. Further discussion and analysis has led to suggestions for improvement of the sales process. The results shows that the majority of interviewed real estate agents believe the sales process to some extent can be improved. The majority of the interviewed real estate agents points out the importance of creating and maintain good relations with partners and colleagues in the same economic area. This is considered to be essential for businesses that rely on a third person should proceed with as few obstacles as possible. It is also clear that many of the problems that emerged due to external factors that the real estate agents themselves can´t influence. Factors affecting the world economy, interest rates, situation of the property market, speculations among media, laws and regulations are factors beyond the real estate agent´s control. However, after further discussion it became evident that active real estate agents already considered the process inadequate or excessively time consuming. It is also evident that many of the problem areas were due to external factors not influenced by real estate agents. Furthermore, the new real estate law which was implemented July 1, 2011 contributed to several problem areas already identified being addressed and resolved. This report has led to the identification of a process which would make the work easier.

While there is an ever increasing adoption of e-sourcing, where a buyer auctions off procurement contracts to a small group of pre-qualified suppliers, there is a lack of understanding of the impact of dynamic bidding process on procurement outcomes and bidding behavior. To extend the knowledge of this important issue, in this thesis, we explore empirically the value of online procurement auction on cost reduction, quality management, and winner selection from the buyer's perspective. We also explore how incumbent status affects the procurement outcomes. From suppliers' perspective, we characterize their bidding behavior and examine the effect of incumbent status on bidding. First, we collect detailed auction and contract awarding data for manufacturing goods during 2002-2004 from a large buyer in the high-tech industry. The rich data set enables us to apply statistical model based cluster technique to uncover heterogeneous bidding behavior of industry participants. The distribution of the bidding patterns varies between incumbent and non-incumbent suppliers. We also find that the buyer bias towards the incumbent suppliers by awarding them procurement contracts more often and with a price premium. Next, focusing on recurring auctions, we find that suppliers bid adaptively. The adaptive bidding is affected by the rank of suppliers' final bids. Finally, with field data of procurement auction for legal services, we demonstrate that service prices are on average reduced after dynamic bidding events. Most interestingly, the cost savings are achieved without the sacrifice of quality. Incumbent winners' quality is higher, on average, than the quality of buyer's supplier base before the auctions, while non-incumbent winner's quality is lower. These findings imply that the main value of online procurement auctions for business services comes from incumbents in the form of reduced price and enhanced quality. We find that after adjusting for incumbents' higher quality, incumbent bias disappears. Our results also imply that the buyer might possess important information about the incumbents, through past experiences, that cannot be easily included in the buyer's scoring function due to uncodifiability.

Bidding is a very competitive process in the construction industry; each competitor’s business is based on winning or losing these bids. Contractors would like to predict the bids that may be submitted by their competitors. This will help contractors to obtain contracts and increase their business. Unit prices that are estimated for each quantity differ from contractor to contractor. These unit costs are dependent on factors such as historical data used for estimating unit costs, vendor quotes, market surveys, amount of material estimated, number of projects the contractor is working on, equipment rental costs, the amount of equipment owned by the contractor, and the risk averseness of the estimator. These factors are nearly similar when estimators are estimating cost of similar projects. Thus, there is a relationship between the projects that a particular contractor has bid in previous years and the cost the contractor is likely to quote for future projects. This relationship could be used to predict bids that the contractor might quote for future projects. For example, a contractor may use historical data for a certain year for bidding on certain type of projects, the unit prices may be adjusted for size, time and location, but the basis for bidding on projects of similar types is the same. Statistical tools can be used to model the underlying relationship between the final cost of the project quoted by a contractor to the quantities of materials or amount of tasks performed in a project. There are a number of statistical modeling techniques, but a model used for predicting costs should be flexible enough that it could adjust to depict any underlying pattern. Data such as amount of work to be performed for a certain line item, material cost index, labor cost index and a unique identifier for each participating contractor is used to predict bids that a contractor might quote for a certain project. To perform the analysis, artificial neural networks and multivariate adaptive regression splines are used. The results obtained from both the techniques are compared, and it is found that multivariate adaptive regression splines are able to predict the cost better than artificial neural networks.

This dissertation investigates the latent but critical effects of risk attitude on competitive success in construction applying an evolutionary approach. The approach considers contractors as individual entities competing with each other for common job opportunities, and competition as an evolutionary process in the market. In construction, competitive bidding is the major mechanism of competition. Bidding itself is an important managerial function in a construction organization while it is risky since the actual cost of a job is unknown. Therefore, contractors' risk-taking in competition is an essential element in the construction business. Individuals may behave differently in competition depending on their own risk attitude which defines what risks can be accepted or not in an organization. Depending on the differences in risk-taking, the result of a competition varies. How contractors compete, that is, how they take risks in competition affects the competition among themselves. Also, contractors' performance is differentiated through competition to decide successful firms and unsuccessful firms. The current study investigates the effects of risk attitude, which is the latent basis for contractors' different behaviors in competition. The current investigation is unique in that it combines: 1) an evolutionary approach; 2) behavioral decision-making under uncertainty; 3) multi-level analyses from the individual to the aggregate; and 4) a long-term perspective on firms' success and life-cycles (birth, death, survival, growth, contraction, and market diversification). The developed evolutionary model simulates and analyzes competition among contractors in the competitive bidding environment. A new method is proposed to represent contractors' different risk-taking behaviors depending on their own risk attitude. The analysis accounts for contractors' differences in risk-taking, their performances through competition, and corresponding organizational changes in life-cycles at the individual level, and aggregate patterns evolving at the population level as resultants of competition over long time periods. The study finds that risk attitude is a latent but dominant competitive characteristic of contractors by identifying the critical effects of risk attitude on competitive success. The results provide new insights on competition and recommendations for contractors' competitive success, which are not available using conventional approaches.

The English online auction creates great business opportunities. However, it¡¦s different from traditional English auction in long bidding time, wide area, high risk, massive information, and low switching cost. It makes bidders easy to search information of the goods but difficult to win the auction. The bidders' transaction cost structure has changed from information phase to agreement phase. So, the bidders need more precise supporting tools to help them make decisions. The aim of this research is to investigate two-person optimal bidding strategies under three dimensions of the decision space: the sequence decision (bid firstly or later), the bid decision (bid or quit), and the jump decision (minimum increase or jump bid). It is assumed that there are two bidders competing in one auction. Variables associated with the auction system include the floor price and the minimum increase. Variables associated with the bidders include the private value of the bidding object, and the cost of bid per turn. Strategies were evaluated based on the following criteria: who wins, how many turns to win the bid, the deal price, the utility of the winner and the loser, the probability of winning, and the expected utility. The results indicate that every strategy has its advantages and disadvantages under certain conditions. This research provides guiding rules for the bidders to choose a better strategy.

<p>Unforeseen changes in production or consumption in power systems lead to changes in grid frequency. This can cause damages to the system, or to frequency sensitive equipment at the consumers. The system operator (SO) is the responsible for balancing production and consumption in the system. The regulating market is the market place where the SO can sell or purchase electricity in order to balance unforeseen events. Producers acting on the regulating market must be able to change their production levels fast (within minutes) when required. Hydropower is therefore suitable for trading on the regulating market because of its flexibility in power production. This thesis describes models that hydropower owners can use to generate optimal bidding strategies when the regulating market is considered.</p><p>When planning for trading on the market, the prices are not known. Therefore, the prices are considered as stochastic variables. The planning problems in this thesis are based on multi-stage stochastic optimization, where the uncertain power prices are represented by scenario trees. The scenario trees are generated by simulation of price scenarios, which is achieved by using a model based on ARIMA and Markov processes. Two optimization models are presented in this thesis:</p><p>* Model for generation of optimal bidding strategies for the regulating market.</p><p>* Model for generation of optimal bidding strategies for the spot market when trading on the regulating market is considered.</p><p>The described models are applied in a case study with real data from the Nordic power system.</p><p>Conclusions of the thesis are that the proposed approaches of modelling prices and generation of bidding strategies are possible to use, and that the models produces reasonable data when applied to real data.</p> / <p>Oväntade produktions- eller konsumtionsändringar i kraftsystem leder till ändringar i nätfrekvens. Detta kan orsaka skador på systemet eller på frekvenskänslig utrustning hos konsumenterna. Systemoperatören (SO) är den ansvarige för att balansera produktion och konsumtion i kraftsystemet. Till sin hjälp har SO reglermarknaden, som är den handelsplats där SO köper eller säljer el för att balansera oväntade händelser i systemet. Producenter som agerar på reglermarknaden måste snabbt (inom minuter) kunna ändra sina produktionsnivåer om så behövs. Vattenkraft är därför lämplig för handel på reglermarknaden på grund av dess flexibilitet i kraftproduktion. Denna avhandling beskriver modeller som vattenkraftägare kan använda för generering av optimala budstrategier då reglermarknaden beaktas.</p><p>När en producents planering för handel på marknaden utförs är marknadspriserna okända. Dessa är därför betraktade som stokastiska variabler. Planeringmodellerna som presenteras i denna avhandling är baserade på multi-periodisk stokastisk programmering, där de osäkra marknadspriserna är representerade av ett scenarieträd. Scenarierna i trädet genereras genom simulering av marknadspriser. En prismodell, baserad på ARIMA- och Markovprocesser, har därför utvecklats. Två olika optimeringsmodeller presenteras i denna avhandling:</p><p>* Model för generering av optimala budstrategier för reglermarknaden.</p><p>* Model för generering av optimala budstrategier för spotmarknaden då handel på reglermarknaden beaktas.</p><p>Modellerna tillämpas i en studie där data från den nordiska elmarknaden appliceras. Slutsatser i avhandlingen är att de föreslagna ansatserna för modellering av priser och generering av budstrategier är möjliga att anvÄanda, samt att modellerna producerar rimliga resultat när applicerade på verkliga data.</p>

Unit-demand auctions have been well studied with applications in several areas. In this dissertation, we discuss new variants of the unit-demand auction that are motivated by practical applications. We design mechanisms for these variants that have strong properties related to truthfulness, efficiency, scalability, and privacy. The main contributions of this dissertation can be divided into two parts. In the first part, we introduce a new variant of the classic sealed-bid unit-demand auction in which each item is associated with a put option; the put option of an item gives the seller the right to sell the item at a specified strike price to a specified bidder, regardless of market conditions. We motivate our unit-demand auction setting by discussing applications to the reassignment of leases, and to the design of multi-round auctions. For the classic sealed-bid unit-demand framework, the VCG mechanism provides a truthful auction with strong associated guarantees, including efficiency and envy-freedom. For an item in our auction, the strike price of the associated put imposes a lower bound on the auction price. Due to these lower bound constraints on auction prices, we find that the VCG mechanism is not suitable for our setting. Instead, our work draws on two fundamental techniques, one from the realm of mechanism design for numerical preferences -- the dynamic unit-demand approximate auction of Demange, Gale, and Sotomayor -- and one from the realm of mechanism design for ordinal preferences -- the Top Trading Cycles algorithm -- to obtain a natural auction that satisfies the lower bound constraints on auction prices. While we cannot, in general, achieve either efficiency or envy-freedom in our setting, our auction achieves suitably relaxed versions of these properties. For example, this auction is envy-free for all bidders who do not acquire an item via the exercise of a put. We provide a polynomial time implementation of this auction. By breaking ties in an appropriate manner, we are able to prove that this auction is truthful. In the second part, we specify rules for a dynamic unit-demand auction that supports arbitrary bid revision. In each round, the dynamic auction takes a tentative allocation and pricing as part of the input, and allows each bidder -- including a tentatively allocated bidder -- to submit an arbitrary unit-demand bid. Each round of our dynamic auction is implemented via a single application of the sealed-bid unit-demand auction proposed in the first part. We show that our dynamic auction satisfies strong properties related to truthfulness and efficiency. Using a certain privacy preservation property of each round of the auction, we show that the overall dynamic auction is highly resistant to shilling. We present a fast algorithm for implementing the proposed auction. Using this algorithm, the amortized cost of processing each bidding operation is upper bounded by the complexity of solving a single-source shortest paths problem on a graph with nonnegative edge weights and a node for each item in the auction. We also propose a dynamic price adjustment scheme that discourages sniping by providing bidders with incentives to bid early in the auction. / text