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Wholesale Price Auctions for Dual Sourcing under Supply Risk
Author(s) -
Huang He,
Li Zhipeng,
Xu Hongyan
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
decision sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.238
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1540-5915
pISSN - 0011-7315
DOI - 10.1111/deci.12281
Subject(s) - newsvendor model , bidding , microeconomics , procurement , economics , diversification (marketing strategy) , reverse auction , dual (grammatical number) , english auction , common value auction , econometrics , business , industrial organization , supply chain , marketing , art , literature , management
Wholesale price bids commonly occur in procurement auctions where dual sourcing is usually employed to mitigate supply risks. When at most two winners are required, unreliable wholesale price bidders face the unique trade‐off between unit margin and quantity allocation that depends on both winners' bids and the reliabilities. Motivated by above facts and considerations, we investigate several auction formats accommodating wholesale price bids for dual sourcing under newsvendor market, with unreliable suppliers possessing private costs. Generalized first‐price auction (GFA) is designed under known cost distribution, while generalized English auction (GEA) and optimal auction with learning (OAL) are examined under unknown distribution. Through a preannounced allocation rule to curb the bidding behavior, both GFA and OAL balance information rent and quantity allocation and generate various diversification degrees. Information asymmetry under GFA depresses the quantity proportion for high‐cost winner, because he charges higher unit information rent than low‐cost winner does. In contrast, two winners in GEA collude at the same price and thus split the order quantity evenly. The full diversification possibly enables GEA to generate higher service level than GFA under high supply risk, although the expected output quantity of GEA is always lower. Regarding the practical requirement for auction format choice, when the costs of implementation and distribution acquisition are not negligible, the previous analysis suggests that the favorable format is driven from GFA or OAL to GEA, as supply risk or the number of bidders increases, or as retail price exceeds a threshold. We also extend to multisourcing cases and examine the impacts of salvage and lost sale on auction format choice.