Wholesale Price Auctions for Dual Sourcing under Supply Risk
研究了在供应风险下，双源采购中批发价拍卖的不同形式，分析了信息不对称对投标行为、订单分配和服务水平的影响，为拍卖形式选择提供指导。
ABSTRACT 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.