Timber selling policies using bundle-based auction : the case of public forests in Québec

In the province of Québec, the government provides 25% of the volume of timber that is annually cut in crown forests through sealed-bid one-winner auctions. It was noted that many offers are made for some areas but few or none are made for many other areas. As such, a significant number of the timber volumes remains unsold. However, the combination of areas to form bundles can provide economy of scale that is not seen otherwise. We highlight some issues regarding the current allocation system and we analyse the effectiveness of different bundling systems in maximizing government revenues and enhancing bidders' competitiveness. We use actual forest data to evaluate different rules and strategies for the creation and allocation of partial and full bundles. Our results suggest that the use of the option of bundling forests areas makes the auction process more beneficial to the majority of stakeholders: Government revenues are increased; the bidding companies are more likely to obtain the desired volumes and pay less for harvesting and equipment relocation; and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced

Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing

In this paper we propose a two-stage protocol for resource management in a hierarchically organized cloud. The first stage exploits spatial locality for the formation of coalitions of supply agents; the second stage, a combinatorial auction, is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases, a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction for the package of services requested by each client. The protocol strikes a balance between low-cost services for cloud clients and a decent profit for the service providers. We also report the results of an empirical investigation of the combinatorial auction stage of the protocol.Comment: 14 page

Auctioning Greenhouse Gas Emissions Permits in Australia

The allocation of permits is an important design aspect of an emissions trading scheme. Traditionally, governments have favoured the free allocation of greenhouse gas permits based on individual historical emissions (‘grandfathering’) or industry benchmark data. Particularly in the EU, the free allocation of permits has proven complex and inefficient and the distributional implications are politically difficult to justify; auctioning emissions permits has therefore become more popular. The EU is now moving to auction more than 50 per cent of all permits in 2013, and in the US the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) has begun auctioning more than 90 per cent of total allowances. Another case in point is the Australian proposal for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), which provides for auctioning a significant share of total permits. This paper discusses the proposed Australian CPRS’s auction design. A major difference to other emissions trading schemes is that the CPRS plans to auction multiple vintages of emissions permits simultaneously.Auctions, carbon auctions, greenhouse gas auctions

Fair Division of a Graph

We consider fair allocation of indivisible items under an additional constraint: there is an undirected graph describing the relationship between the items, and each agent's share must form a connected subgraph of this graph. This framework captures, e.g., fair allocation of land plots, where the graph describes the accessibility relation among the plots. We focus on agents that have additive utilities for the items, and consider several common fair division solution concepts, such as proportionality, envy-freeness and maximin share guarantee. While finding good allocations according to these solution concepts is computationally hard in general, we design efficient algorithms for special cases where the underlying graph has simple structure, and/or the number of agents -or, less restrictively, the number of agent types- is small. In particular, despite non-existence results in the general case, we prove that for acyclic graphs a maximin share allocation always exists and can be found efficiently.Comment: 9 pages, long version of accepted IJCAI-17 pape

Scoring auctions: are they the key to marketbased allocation of airport slots?

Air transport has increased almost fifteen-fold worldwide in the last half-century (1970- 2019) and is expected to return to this trend in the next few years, after falling from 4.558 billion passengers in 2019 to 1.809 billion passengers in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Airport capacity has not kept pace with such growth and, therefore, more than two hundred major airports worldwide face capacity constraints and are “coordinated”. Efficient allocation of scarce airport capacity is critical for air traffic growth, as well as for the overall air transport dynamic efficiency. However, the allocation of airport slots in Europe and elsewhere is still ruled by administrative processes, based on the IATA Worldwide Slot Guidelines, which follow historical precedence (called “Grandfather Rights”) and time adjustments of historical slots. Several objections have been raised to the adoption of market mechanisms in slot allocation, as an alternative to administrative processes, and they are still rarely used. Despite often being suggested in the literature, the use of auctions for slot allocation has only been implemented in some local routes in China, and apparently this underemployment of auction mechanisms has been due to the reluctance of coordination authorities to face the risks that have been pointed out regarding airlines’ long-term route planning, the usage costs related to excess slots, origin-destination pairing, and competition distortions. However, scoring auctions have never been considered and our research shows that their properties combined with an appropriate auction design could overcome most of those objections and mitigate the associated risks. Furthermore, the current drop in air traffic provides an opportune window for the introduction of auctions as a mechanism for the allocation of airport slots with minimal risks of disruption to airline business models