Multi-object auctions differ in an important way from single-object auctions. When bidders have multi-object demand, equilibria can exist in which bids decrease as values increase! Consider a model with n bidders who receive affiliated one-dimensional types t and whose marginal values are non-decreasing in t and strictly increasing in own type ti. In the first-price auction of a single object, all equilibria are monotone (over the range of types that win with positive probability) in that each bidder's equilibrium bid is non-decreasing in type. On the other hand, some or all equilibria may be non-monotone in many multi-object auctions. In particular, examples are provided for the as-bid and uniform-price auctions of identical objects in which (i) some bidder reduces his bids on all units as his type increases in all equilibria and (ii) symmetric bidders all reduce their bids on some units in all equilibria, and for the as-bid auction of non-identical objects in which (iii) bidders have independent types and some bidder reduces his bids on some packages in all equilibria. Fundamentally, this difference in the structure of equilibria is due to the fact that payoffs fail to satisfy strategic complementarity and/or modularity in these multi-object auctions.

From the time of Don Hernando Cortez, livestock has been one of America's greatest industries. The cattle in Cortez ' s time were Moorish stock which had been bred for centuries in the Andalusian Plains of Spain.

Valuation of leases based on the contingent valuation may be biased because hypothetical data has limitations. This study used the hedonic method to evaluate factors affecting the value of hunting leases on Sixteenth Section Lands in Mississippi that are auctioned to the public. Due to the competitive nature of the issuance of these leases, this study provides a comprehensive and unbiased estimate of the impact that cover type, game quality, distance to urban areas, and location have on hunting lease prices. The implicit prices of these characteristics indicate that land managers should adopt shorter lease lengths, smaller lease sizes and improve habitat to increase lease revenue.

This thesis investigated trust over the Internet to seek a better understanding of trust and ways to increase trust in online transactions. The focus of this investigation was consumer-to-consumer transactions at online auctions where key actors were virtually anonymous to each other. The perceptions of a broad range of online auction community members support this thesis. Normative and grounded theoretical perspectives of trust and factors that affected trust were considered, compared and contrasted as part of this research. Concept mapping and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) were used to underpin the grounded theoretical perspective of trust developed as part of this thesis. Online auction cases were selected and analysed to check the grounded theoretical perspective of trust developed. This thesis provided a better understanding of trust, provided new insights into trust and distrust, added to the body of theory for trust and identified ways to increase trust in online transactions. This thesis provided better understandings of: trust; moral obligations; network decision structures; power; fairness; and perceived behavioural controls at online auctions. A grounded theoretical model of trust based in TPB was developed that was specific to online auctions. This model of trust developed appeared to provide clearer and richer insights into online auction trust. The model of trust developed identified factors and constructs that affected trust rather than the magnitude of any affects. The model developed and findings of this thesis can be applied to new or specific online auction sites to help practitioners build better online environments to encourage more people to transact rather than just browse online. The grounded theoretical perspective of trust and findings of this thesis may be relevant to other online consumer-to-consumer transactional environments.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Karlsruhe, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-234).

This thesis investigated trust over the Internet to seek a better understanding of trust and ways to increase trust in online transactions. The focus of this investigation was consumer-to-consumer transactions at online auctions where key actors were virtually anonymous to each other. The perceptions of a broad range of online auction community members support this thesis. Normative and grounded theoretical perspectives of trust and factors that affected trust were considered, compared and contrasted as part of this research. Concept mapping and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) were used to underpin the grounded theoretical perspective of trust developed as part of this thesis. Online auction cases were selected and analysed to check the grounded theoretical perspective of trust developed. This thesis provided a better understanding of trust, provided new insights into trust and distrust, added to the body of theory for trust and identified ways to increase trust in online transactions. This thesis provided better understandings of: trust; moral obligations; network decision structures; power; fairness; and perceived behavioural controls at online auctions. A grounded theoretical model of trust based in TPB was developed that was specific to online auctions. This model of trust developed appeared to provide clearer and richer insights into online auction trust. The model of trust developed identified factors and constructs that affected trust rather than the magnitude of any affects. The model developed and findings of this thesis can be applied to new or specific online auction sites to help practitioners build better online environments to encourage more people to transact rather than just browse online. The grounded theoretical perspective of trust and findings of this thesis may be relevant to other online consumer-to-consumer transactional environments.

Univ., Diss.--Karlsruhe, 2006.

A key problem in designing marketplaces is how to efficiently allocate a collection of goods among multiple people. Auctions have emerged as a powerful tool with the promise to increase market efficiency by allocating goods to those who value them the most. Nevertheless, traditional auctions are unable to handle real-world market complexities. Over the past decade, there has been a trend towards allowing for package bids and other types of multidimensional bidding techniques that enable suppliers to take advantage of their unique abilities and put forth their best offers. In particular the application of iterative combinatorial auctions in procurement saves negotiation costs and time. Conceptually these auctions show a potential for improving the overall market efficiency. However, in practice they host several new challenges and difficulties. One challenge facing the auctioneer in an iterative combinatorial auction environment is to quickly find an acceptable solution for each round of the auction. Bidders require time to precisely evaluate, price, and communicate different possible combinations based on their current information of item prices. The auctioneer requires time to solve the underlying mathematical problem formulation based on the bids received, report back the feedback information and initiate a new round of the auction. In Chapter 3, we propose a Lagrangian-based heuristic to solve the auctioneer's winner determination problem. After generating the Lagrange multipliers from the solution of a linear relaxation, the heuristic applies several procedures to fix any potentially infeasible optimal Lagrange solutions. In addition to providing an efficient way of solving the winner determination problem, as compared with the leading commercial solver CPLEX, our approach provides Lagrange multipliers. The latter are used as proxies for prices in the auction feedback mechanism. In Chapter 4 we develop a model for the bidders pricing problem, an issue that has received much less attention in the literature. Using the auctioneer feedback, that includes the Lagrange multipliers, the pricing model maximizes the bidders' profit while at the same time keeping their bids competitive. We derive several optimality results for the underlying optimization problem. Interestingly, we analytically show that the auction converges to a point where no bidder is able to submit a bid that yields strictly better profit for him and is not less competitive than his previous bids submitted. We experimentally observe that this approach converges in an early stage. We also find that this iterative auction allows the bidders to improve their profit while providing lower and competitive prices to the auctioneer. In Chapter 5, we introduce a flexible auction model that allows for partial bids. Rather than the regular all-or-nothing indivisible package bids, divisible bids provide flexibility for the auctioneer with the possibility to accept parts of the bids and yet allow the suppliers to capture synergies among the items and provide quantity discounts. We show numerically that this approach improves the overall efficiency of the auction by increasing the suppliers' profit while decreasing the auctioneer's total price of procurement. In addition, we find that computationally the flexible auction outperforms the regular auction. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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No / This chapter examines the role of business-to-business electronic reverse auctions (eRAs), one tool in the armoury of e-purchasing used by businesses including retailers. It tracks the development of this particular technology through the hype cycle and presents some propositions to maximise the use of eRAs as an effective e-purchasing tool. It also explains the damaging effect of the early negative perceptions and underlines the difficulty in overcoming them.