Ranked Items Auctions and Online Advertisement

We study auctions for a set of commonly‐ranked items where each buyer has unit demand. This setting has promising applications in areas such as keyword auctions in the search engine advertising industry, the sale of quality‐ranked raw materials, etc. An auction mechanism suitable for this setting is the simultaneous pooled auction (SPA), where each bidder simultaneously submits a single bid and is allocated an object based on the rank of his bid among all the bids. We study how to improve the seller's expected revenue by enforcing a reserve price in an SPA. We find that the use of an appropriate reserve price may significantly increase the seller's revenue, especially when the number of items for sale is relatively large compared to the number of participating bidders. One inherent problem in the SPA is that some bidders may incur ex post losses; that is, they pay more than what they value the received objects. We propose a tailored VCG mechanism that generates the same expected revenue as the SPA does, while bidders do not incur any ex post loss. We also discuss the potential applications of this research to keyword auctions.     

Customer Behavior Modeling in Revenue Management and Auctions: A Review and New Research Opportunities

Customer behavior modeling has been gaining increasing attention in the operations management community. In this paper we review current models of customer behavior in the revenue management and auction literatures and suggest several future research directions.     

带预算约束的广告主均衡报价研究——基于纳什均衡角度

从广告主角度出发，研究基于纳什均衡概念的带有预算约束的关键词拍卖问题。首先推导出纳什均衡下各个广告主报价的上界和下界。其次给出广告主报价向上偏离无利可图的充要条件，并进行了数值分析。此外，通过数值实例分析了广告主报价向下偏离时对其收益的影响。利用各个广告主报价的上下界和预算刻画了带有预算约束的纳什均衡。最后，利用广告主报价在纳什均衡下的上界给出报价向量是带预算约束的纳什均衡的充要条件。对于广告主制定预算策略具有参考作用。     

Balancing Revenues and Repair Costs under Partial Information about Product Reliability

We consider the problem faced by a company selling a product with warranty and under partial information about the product reliability. The product can fail from multiple failure types, each of which is associated with an inherently different repair cost. If the product fails within the warranty duration, then the company is required to pay the repair cost. The company does not know the probabilities associated with different failure types, but it learns the failure probabilities as sales occur and failure information is accumulated. If the failure probabilities turn out to be too high and it becomes costly to fulfill the warranty coverage, then the company may decide to stop selling the product, possibly replacing it with a more reliable alternative. The objective is to decide if and when to stop. By formulating the problem as a dynamic program with Bayesian learning, we establish structural properties of the optimal policy. Since computing the optimal policy is intractable due to the high dimensional state space, we propose two approximation methods. The first method is based on decomposing the problem by failure types and it provides upper bounds on the value functions. The second method provides lower bounds on the value functions and it is based on a deterministic approximation. Computational experiments indicate that the policy from the first method provides noticeable benefits, especially when it is difficult to form good estimates of the failure probabilities quickly.     

Tractable Consideration Set Structures for Assortment Optimization and Network Revenue Management

Discrete‐choice models are widely used to model consumer purchase behavior in assortment optimization and revenue management. In many applications, each customer segment is associated with a consideration set that represents the set of products that customers in this segment consider for purchase. The firm has to make a decision on what assortment to offer at each point in time without the ability to identify the customer's segment. A linear program called the Choice‐based Deterministic Linear Program (CDLP) has been proposed to determine these offer sets. Unfortunately, its size grows exponentially in the number of products and it is NP‐hard to solve when the consideration sets of the segments overlap. The Segment‐based Deterministic Concave Program with some additional consistency equalities (SDCP+) is an approximation of CDLP that provides an upper bound on CDLP's optimal objective value. SDCP+ can be solved in a fraction of the time required to solve CDLP and often achieves the same optimal objective value. This raises the question under what conditions can one guarantee equivalence of CDLP and SDCP+. In this study, we obtain a structural result to this end, namely that if the segment consideration sets overlap with a certain tree structure or if they are fully nested, CDLP can be equivalently replaced with SDCP+. We give a number of examples from the literature where this tree structure arises naturally in modeling customer behavior.     

Universal supplier selection via multi-dimensional auction mechanisms for two-way competition in oligopoly market of supply chain

Allocation of the tasks in competitive market conditions at each echelon of the supply chain is an important activity in the supply chain. The task allocation problem, referred to as supply chain formation process, normally faces information asymmetry in the supply chain. The information asymmetry is caused by rational and intelligent players trying to maximize their own profit rather than opt for the supply chain profit as a whole. Thus, the process of allocating tasks in such situations becomes difficult and will result in externalities in the supply chain trades. These externalities can be internalized with present methodologies in the literature. In this paper, the major internalization methods in different contexts are considered. Lagrange relaxation and Vickery Clarke Groves (VCG) auction mechanism are explored in order to form a supply chain. This paper proposes the multi-stage auction mechanism analyzing two-way competitions, a Bertrand and Cournot competition where price per unit and quantity are the underlying two parameters in a utility analysis. To analyze the problem in real life, the industry example of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd. (IRCTC) procurement process has been taken which demonstrates the usability of the proposed framework.     

基于需求转移的易逝性产品最优动态定价策略

本文针对易逝性产品中新产品对老产品需求的转移作用,应用收入管理方法得出老产品的最优动态定价策略,并应用最大凹向包络理论给出了简化算法的方法.数值算例表明在存在需求转移的情况下,应更早的提供较低的价格.最后作者给出了包含生产和定价的综合模型.     

基于集成供应的RS契约协调模型研究

在由供应商和制造商组成的两级供应链中引入集成商,研究了需求不确定且价格敏感条件下基于集成供应的3级供应链的协调问题,建立了满足渠道协调条件和集成供应条件的RS契约协调模型,给出了模型中RS契约参数的取值范围和取值过程,并用实例加以说明。利用模型不仅可以确定产品的生产量和销售价格,而且还可以通过RS契约参数实现供应链利润的分配。     

论深化税收征管改革面临的主要问题及解决对策

现行税收征管模式与新的经济形势和征管环境相比 ,越来越清晰地显露出不足与滞后 ,监管乏力、信息失真、协作不畅、稽查低效、服务欠缺 ,税收目标难以实现。为此 ,必须调整征管格局 ,实行专业化分工 ,优化资源配置 ,建立人机互动协作关系 ,处理好管事与管户、管税的关系 ,提高稽查的有效性和针对性     

社会主义经济基础新论

确立国有经济的主导地位,意味着社会主义经济基础建立起来.社会主义经济基础巩固与否,不取决于它在国民经济中的比重.在新形势下,要重视对社会主义上层建筑反作用的研究.