Cow-Calf Producer Perceptions Regarding Individual Animal Traceability

This study provides valuable insights into cow-calf producer voluntary participation in the National Animal Identification System and producers’ perceptions of several issues critically impacting the success of voluntary traceability systems. Cow-calf producers believe that the most important issues to the U.S. beef industry in designing a national, individual animal traceability system are monitoring/managing disease, maintaining current foreign markets, accessing foreign markets, and increasing consumer confidence. Furthermore, producers are concerned with cost, liability, reliability of technology, failure of system to meet stated goals, and confidentiality of information associated with these systems.animal traceability, cow-calf, National Animal Identification System, voluntary adoption, Agribusiness, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q12, Q18, R38,

Chain: A Dynamic Double Auction Framework for Matching Patient Agents

In this paper we present and evaluate a general framework for the design of truthful auctions for matching agents in a dynamic, two-sided market. A single commodity, such as a resource or a task, is bought and sold by multiple buyers and sellers that arrive and depart over time. Our algorithm, Chain, provides the first framework that allows a truthful dynamic double auction (DA) to be constructed from a truthful, single-period (i.e. static) double-auction rule. The pricing and matching method of the Chain construction is unique amongst dynamic-auction rules that adopt the same building block. We examine experimentally the allocative efficiency of Chain when instantiated on various single-period rules, including the canonical McAfee double-auction rule. For a baseline we also consider non-truthful double auctions populated with zero-intelligence plus"-style learning agents. Chain-based auctions perform well in comparison with other schemes, especially as arrival intensity falls and agent valuations become more volatile

Essays on Information Flows and Auction Outcomes in Business-to-Business Market: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence

In this dissertation, I have three separate essays in the context of Business-to Business (B2B) auctions; in each I introduce a complex problem regarding the impact of information flows on auction's performance which has not been addressed by prior auction literature. The first two essays (Chapter 1 and 2) are empirical studies in the context of online secondary market B2B auctions while the third essay (Chapter 3) is a theoretical investigation and will contribute to the B2B procurement auction literature. The findings from this dissertation have managerial implications of how/when auctioneers can improve the efficiency or success of their operations. B2B auctions are new types of ventures which have begun to shape how industries of all types trade goods. Online B2B auctions have also become particularly popular for industrial procurement and liquidation purposes. By using online B2B auctions companies can benefit by creating competition when auctioning off goods or contracts to business customers. B2B Procurement auctions− where the buyer runs an auction to procure goods and services from suppliers− have been documented as saving firms millions of dollars by lowering the cost of procurement. On the other hand, B2B auctions are also commonly used by sellers in `secondary market' to liquidate the left-over goods to business buyers in a timely fashion. In order to maximize revenues in either both industrial procurement or secondary market settings, auctioneers should understand how the auction participants behave and react to the available market information or auction design. Auctioneers can then use this knowledge to improve the performance of their B2B auctions by choosing the right auction design or strategies. In the first essay, I investigate how an online B2B secondary market auction environment can provide several sources of information that can be used by bidders to form their bids. One such information set that has been relatively understudied in the literature pertains to reference prices available to the bidder from other concurrent and comparable auctions. I will examine how reference prices from such auctions affect bidding behavior on the focal auction conditioning on bidders' types. I will use longitudinal data of auctions and bids for more than 4000 B2B auctions collected from a large liquidator firm in North America. In the second essay, I report on the results of a field experiment that I carried out on a secondary market auction site of another one of the nation's largest B2B wholesale liquidators. The design of this field experiment on iPad marketplace is directly aimed at understanding how (i) the starting price of the auction, and (ii) the number of auctions for a specific (model, quality), i.e., the supply of that product, interact to impact the auction final price. I also explore how a seller should manage the product differentiation so that she auctions off the right mix and supply of products at the reasonable starting prices. Finally, in the last essay, I study a norm used in many procurement auctions in which buyers grant the `Right of First Refusal' (ROFR) to a favored supplier. Under ROFR, the favored supplier sees the bids of all other participating suppliers and has the opportunity to match the (current) winning bid. I verify the conventional wisdom that ROFR increases the buyer's procurement cost in a single auction setting. With a looming second auction in the future (with the same participating suppliers), I show that the buyer lowers his procurement cost by granting the ROFR to a supplier. The analytical findings of this essay highlights the critical role of information flows and the timing of information-release in procurement auctions with ROFR

An American Model for the EU Gas Market?

It is generally believed that the American model is not suitable for Europe, yet North America is the only large and working competitive gas market in the world. The paper shows how its model could be adapted as a target for market design within the European institutional framework. It starts from analysis of the main peculiar economic features of the gas transportation industry, which should underpin any efficient model. After the Third Package is properly implemented the EU will share several building blocks of the American model: effective unbundling of transportation and supply; regulated tariffs which, for long distance transportation, are in fact largely related to capacity and distance; investments based mostly on industry’s initiative and resources, and the related decisions are increasingly made after open and public processes. Yet Europe needs to harmonize tariff regulation criteria, which could be achieved through a monitoring process. National separation of main investment decisions should be overcome, possibly by organising a common platform where market forces and public authorities interact with private suppliers to require existing and develop new capacity, whereas industry competitively offers its solutions. Such platform would allow for long term capacity reservation, subject to caps and congestion management provisions. Auctions and possibly market coupling would play an important role in the allocation of short term capacity but a limited one in long term. Market architecture and the organisation of hubs would also be developed mostly by market forces under regulatory oversight. The continental nature of the market suggests a likely concentration of trading in a very limited number of main markets, whereas minor markets would have a limited role and would be connected to major ones, with price differences reflecting transportation costs and market conditions. Excessive interference or pursuit of political goals in less than transparent ways involves the risk of slower liquidity development and higher market fragmentation. With this view as a background, regulatory work aimed at completing the European market should be based on ensuring the viability of interconnections between current markets and on the establishment of common platforms and co-ordinated tariff systems, fostering the conditions for upstream and transportation capacity development.Hubs; infrastructure; target model; network tariffs; gas market design; capacity allocation

A simulation based supply partner selection decision support tool for service provision in Dell.

Partner selection is an important aspect of all outsourcing processes. Traditional partner selection, typically involves steps to determine the criteria for outsourcing, followed by a qualification of potential suppliers and concluding with a final selection of partner(s). Reverse auctions (RAs) have widely been used for partner selection in recent times. However, RAs, although proven successful in initial price reduction strategies for product and service provision, can suffer from reduced effectiveness as the number of executions increases. This paper illustrates Dell’s experience of such diminishing returns for its outsourced after sales product repair service and presents the development, of a new partner selection methodology which incorporates a new process improvement stage to be executed in combination with the final selection phase. This new methodology is underpinned by the development of a computer based simulation supply partner selection decision support tool for service provision. The paper highlights the significant additional cost saving benefits achievable and improvement in service through the use of advanced simulation based decision supports

Social Value Propagation for Supply Chain Formation

Supply Chain Formation is the process of determining the participants in a supply chain, who will exchange what with whom, and the terms of the exchanges. Decentralized supply chain formation appears as a highly intricate task because agents only possess local information, have limited knowledge about the capabilities of other agents, and prefer to preserve privacy. State-of-the-art decentralized supply chain formation approaches can either: (i) #12;find supply chains of high value at the expense of high resources usage; or (ii) fi#12;nd supply chains of low value with low resources usage. This work presents chainme, a novel decentralized supply chain formation algorithm. Our results show that chainme fi#12;nds supply chains with higher value than state-of-the-art decentralized algorithms whilst decreasing the amount of resources required from one up to four orders of magnitude.Peer Reviewe