Study On The Theory And Method Of Auction Mechanism Design For Several Kinds Of Speciality Objects

In recent years, the governments of various countries, more and more through the auction market, implement the privatization of public resources and public goods, refigure the competitive infrastructure industry (telecommunication, electricity, natural gas, traffic, etc.), configure rare public resources and supply public goods with low cost, increase the channels of the fiscal revenues. The private departments transfer their ownership of the assets or purchase the raw materials more through auctioning, too. Under these circumstances, government department and private monopoly procurers are eager for seeking an auction institution that is the most profitable to sell their goods or rights. They need urgently to get more consultations and professional suggestions on this aspect when selecting or designing the optimal auction mechanism. Moreover, along with the enlargement of market participation scope, competition will be increasingly fierce and auction institution become more and more complicate, which further strengthens the monopoly's current desires for mechanism design. In addition, learning the design process of auction mechanism is helpful for people to understand not only the auction (such a kind of simple and particular transaction format) and the forming process of its price, but also other price-forming ways (such as marking-price and bargaining), which is expected to provide practical guidance to the design of auction mechanism and its improvement.The traditional theory of auction design bases on such assumptions that the seller has only one indivisible goods and each bidder has at most one unit of demand. However, the most situations observed in reality are not coincident with these basic assumptions and the optimal auction results will be no longer effective. Since 1990s, the economists have already realized that the explanation ability of auction theory for real markets is weakening slowly, and the traditional auction format has fallen short of guiding new booming auction markets. So, it is urgent to design some efficient auction mechanisms that accord with the characteristics of real markets, so as to adapt to the complexity of the constantly changing market.Therefore, we strive to loose those basic assumptions and consider more general situations: (i) The objects auctioned are heterogeneous (complementary or substitutable); (ii) The buyer's biddings are multi-dimensions, that is, the buyers care about both the price and the other attributes of the objects auctioned; (iii) The auction market is not a market monopolized by one side but double auction market that keep an equal relation of supply and demand between buyers and sellers; (iv) The objects auctioned are divisible and each buyer demands multiple units. In virtue of the design idea of the benchmark auction model, this paper reseaches the optimal design of auction mechanism under more general situations: complementary or substitutable object auction, multi-attribute auction, double auction of indivisible and divisible goods. In addition, since electric energy is a kind of typical divisible goods, we apply the double auction mechanism of divisible objects to the sale of electric energy, which accords with the requirement of the market reform of power system in our country.The paper consists of seven chapters, which are organized as follows:In chapter 1, the research background and signification are introduced. We review briefly the mechanism design theory and the auction theory, and introduce thetheory development of the auction mechanism design. The main contents in this paper are also summarized here.In chapter 2, we introduce briefly the basic theory of mechanism design in discrete and continuous cases, also including the revelation principle, the revenue equivalence principle and the auction mechanism design principle, which are all the research bases of this paper.We study mainly the mechanism design for the complementary or substitutable goods auction in chapter 3. Firstly, we describe the problem of heterogeneous goods auction, set up the basic model and make simplification. Further, to get some detailed and valuable conclusions, we solve the especial case that there are only two kinds of heterogeneous objects and analyze the influence of complementarity on the optimal auction mechanism from the results. In addition, we also discuss the allocation efficiency of the optimal mechanism and explain the reason that results in inefficiency. Finally, under the Branco model, this chapter compares the optimal auction mechanism with several simple and common auction formats — the simultaneous second-price auction, sequential second-price auction and multiple round ascending bid auction — not only on the expectation revenue of sellers but also on allocation efficiency.In chapter 4, we study the mechanism design for the multi-attribute auction. Firstly, the problem of multi-attribute auction is described and in this model the competitor's biddings are multi-dimension and the costs of the enterprises are correlative. Since it is difficult to solve the multi-dimensional optimization problem, we can merger all non-price attributes into one quality dimension and solve the optimal mechanism only for the model of two-dimensional attributes. But the form of the optimal result gained is still complicated, implicit, and difficult to implement in reality. Therefore we propose a simple two-stage auction format to implement it: in the first stage, the "winning" enterprise and its payment are determinated; in the second stage, the quality of the project to be carried through is renegotiated. In the end of this chapter, we proof that the two-stages auction format can surely implement the allocation and payment of the optimal auction mechanism.The mechanism design of double auction of indivisible objects is researched in chapter 5. Firstly, the double auction model for the indivisible objects is built. This model is an optimization problem with four constrains and two objective functions, namely to maximize the expectation residual of participants of both sides under the individual rationality constraint, incentive compatibility constraint, market clearing constraint and budget balance constraint. By solving this model, we get the optimal double auction mechanism, which is consistent with the mechanism proposed by McAfee. Under this mechanism, it is the weakly dominate strategy for buyers and sellers to reveal their truthful values or costs. And the compution of this strategy doesn't need to know the value distribution of buyers and the cost distribution of sellers in advance, which is one of the reasons that the application of the game theory in double auction hasn't been paid much attention. In addition, in this mechanism the auction organizer can gain residual, which can be used to increase fiscal revenues and decrease the welfare distortion brought by tax. Finally, the allocation efficiency of the optimal mechanism is analyzed through numeral examples.In chapter 6, the double auction mechanism is designed for the divisible objects. This mechanism can guarantee auction market clearing and realizing the most effective allocation. Furthermore it also can guarantee the incentive compatibility for buyers and risk-averse sellers. Since the electric energy is a typical kind of divisiblegoods, we can apply the mechanism designed in this chapter to the sale of the electric energy. This mechanism can induce truthful revelation of values or costs from rational consumers and risk-averse power suppliers and realize the economic dispatch of generation. According to real-time character of supply of electric energy, the implementation of this mechanism by adopting 4-heaps data structure is proposed in the end of this chapter.Finally, conclusions and highlights for future work are presented in the last chapter.