Equilibrium Fee Schedules in a Monopolist Call Market

Liquidity plays a crucial role in financial exchange markets. Markets typically create liquidity through spatial consolidation with specialist/market makers matching orders arriving at different times. However, continuous trading systems have an inherent weakness in the potential for insufficient liquidity. This risk was highlighted during the 1987 market crash. Subsequent proposals suggested time consolidation in the form of call markets integrated into the continuous trading environment. This paper explores the optimal fee schedule for a monopolist call market auctioneer competing with a continuous auction market. Liquidity is an externality in that traders are not fully compensated for the liquidity they bring to the market. Thus, in the absence of differential transaction costs, traders have an incentive to delay order entry resulting in significant uncertainty in the number of traders participating at the call. A well-designed call market mechanism has to mitigate this uncertainty. The trading mechanism examined utilizes two elements: commitments to trade and discounts in fees for early commitment; thus, optimal transaction fees are time-dependent. Traders who commit early are rewarded for the enhanced liquidity that their commitment provides to the market. As participants commit earlier they pay strictly lower fees and are strictly better off by participating in the call market rather than in the continuous market. A comparison to the social welfare maximizing fee schedule shows that the monopolist does not internalize the externality completely, with the social welfare maximizing schedule offering lower fees to all traders.

Recomendation systems and crowdsourcing: a good wedding for enabling innovation? Results from technology affordances and costraints theory

Recommendation Systems have come a long way since their first appearance in the e-commerce platforms.Since then, evolved Recommendation Systems have been successfully integrated in social networks. Now its time to test their usability and replicate their success in exciting new areas of web -enabled phenomena. One of these is crowdsourcing. Research in the IS field is investigating the need, benefits and challenges of linking the two phenomena. At the moment, empirical works have only highlighted the need to implement these techniques for tasks assignment in crowdsourcing distributed work platforms and the derived benefits for contributors and firms. We review the variety of the tasks that can be crowdsourced through these platforms and theoretically evaluate the efficiency of using RS to recommend a task in creative crowdsourcing platforms. Adopting a Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory, an emerging perspective in the Information Systems (IS) literature to understand technology use and consequences, we anticipate the tensions that this implementation can generate

Futures Market: Contractual Arrangement to Restrain Moral Hazard in Teams

Holmstrom (1982) argues that a principal is required to restrain moral hazard in a team: wasting output in a certain state is required to enforce efficient effort, and the principal is a commitment device for such enforcement. Under competition in commodity and team-formation markets, I extend his model a la Prescott and Townsend (1984) to show that competitive contracts can exploit the futures market to transfer output across states instead of wasting it. Thus, the futures market replaces the role of principals. An important feature of such contracts is exclusiveness: private access to the the futures market by team members is not allowed. The duality of linear programming is exploited to characterize a market environment and the contractual agreements for efficiency.

Bayesian Incentive Compatibility via Fractional Assignments

Very recently, Hartline and Lucier studied single-parameter mechanism design problems in the Bayesian setting. They proposed a black-box reduction that converted Bayesian approximation algorithms into Bayesian-Incentive-Compatible (BIC) mechanisms while preserving social welfare. It remains a major open question if one can find similar reduction in the more important multi-parameter setting. In this paper, we give positive answer to this question when the prior distribution has finite and small support. We propose a black-box reduction for designing BIC multi-parameter mechanisms. The reduction converts any algorithm into an eps-BIC mechanism with only marginal loss in social welfare. As a result, for combinatorial auctions with sub-additive agents we get an eps-BIC mechanism that achieves constant approximation.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

The optimality of being efficient : designing auctions

A cornerstone of the auction literature is the theory of"optimal auctions."'This theory uses mechanism design techniques to characterize, in general settings, the auction that maximizes the seller's expected revenues. One feature of the solution is that typically there is a conflict between the goals of revenue maximization and efficiency. The revenue-optimizing seller often either places goods in hands other than those who value them the most or withholds goods entirely from the market. However, the conclusion that the seller gains by assigning goods inefficiently depends critically on two strong assumptions: (1) the seller can prevent resale among bidders from occurring after the auction; and (2) the seller can commit to not sell the withheld goods after the auction. In this paper, the authors examine how the optimal auction problem changes when one or both of these assumptions are relaxed. This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the authors establish the seller's general incentive to misassign goods and they identify settings where the optimal auction is efficient. In section 3, they solve two variations on the optimal auction, which recognize the possibility of resale. Section 4 proves that perfect resale destroys the seller's incentive to misassign goods. Section 5 establishes that with perfect resale, any misassignment of goods results in strictly lower seller revenues than the best efficient assignment. In section 6, the paper shows that the Vickrey auction is not distorted by the possibility of resale.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Markets and Market Access,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Access to Markets,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Environmental Economics&Policies

Putting auction theory to work : the simultaneous ascending auction

The"simultaneous ascending auction"was first introduced in 1994 to sell licenses to use bands of radio spectrum in the United States. Much of the attention devoted to the auction came from its role in reducing federal regulation of the radio spectrum and allowing market values, rather than administrative fiat, to determine who would use the spectrum resource. Several parts of economic theory proved helpful in designing the rules for simultaneous ascending auction and in thinking about how the design might be improved and adapted for new applications. After briefly reviewing the major rules of the auction in section 2, the author turns in section 3 to an analysis based on tatonnement theory, which regards the auction as a mechanism for discovering an efficient allocation and its supporting prices. The analysis reveals a fundamental difference between situations in which the licenses are mutual substitutes and others in which the same licenses are sometimes substitutes and sometimes complements. Section 4 is a selective account of some applications of game theory to evaluating the simultaneous ascending auction design for spectrum sales. Results like those reported in section 3 have led to renewed interest in auctions in which bids for license packages are permitted. In section 5, the author uses game theory to analyze the biases in a leading proposal for dynamic combinatorial bidding. Section 6 briefly answers two additional questions that economists often ask about auction design: If trading of licenses after the auction is allowed, why does the auction form matter at all for promoting efficient license assignments? Holding fixed the quantity of licenses to be sold, how sharp is the conflict between the objectives of assigning licenses efficiently and obtaining maximum revenue? Section 7 concludes.Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Markets and Market Access,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism