AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality Tender

Atakelty Hailu, John Rolfe, Jill Windle, Romy Greiner

2010

Abstract

Conservation auctions are tender-based mechanisms for allocating contracts among landholders who are intertested in undertaking conservation activities in return for monetary rewards. These auctions have grown in popularity over the last decade. However, the services offered under these auctions can be complex and auction design and implementation features need to be carefully considered if these auctions are to perform well. Computational experiments are key to bed-testing auction design as the bulk of auction theory (as the rest of economic theory) is focused on simple auctions for tractability reasons. This paper presents results from an agent-based modelling study investigating the impact on performance of four auction features: scope of conservation activities in tendered projects; auction budget levels relative to bidder population size (scale effects); endogeneity of bidder participation; and auction pricing rules (uniform versus discriminatory pricing). The results highlight the importance of a careful consideration of scale and scope issues and that policymakers need to consider alternatives to currently used pay-as-bid or discriminatory pricing fromats. Averaging over scope variations, the uniform auction can deliver at least 25\% more benefits than the discriminatory auction.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Hailu A., Rolfe J., Windle J. and Greiner R. (2010). AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality Tender . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-674-022-1, pages 80-87. DOI: 10.5220/0002730500800087

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart10,
author={Atakelty Hailu and John Rolfe and Jill Windle and Romy Greiner},
title={AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality Tender},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2010},
pages={80-87},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002730500800087},
isbn={978-989-674-022-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality Tender
SN - 978-989-674-022-1
AU - Hailu A.
AU - Rolfe J.
AU - Windle J.
AU - Greiner R.
PY - 2010
SP - 80
EP - 87
DO - 10.5220/0002730500800087