Local Cost Synergies in Reverse Auctions: An Application to Road Salt Procurement
研究明尼苏达州道路盐采购拍卖中，大企业因赢得邻近仓库集群而获得约9%的成本优势，这降低了小企业中标概率并导致拍卖效率下降。
Each winter, Minnesota’s Department of Transportation purchases nearly a quarter-million tons of road salt through competitive auctions. In Local Cost Synergies in Reverse Auctions: An Application to Road Salt Procurement (Gupta, Schmitt, and Stamatopoulos), the authors show that large firms benefit from “local cost synergies” when they win clusters of nearby depots. Because these synergies reduce costs, large firms are able to bid about 9% lower, on average, than they would otherwise. This cost advantage sharply reduces the probability that small firms will win contracts and leads simultaneous auctions to allocate depots less efficiently than possible. The authors conclude that any rigorous examination of procurement auctions must explicitly account for local cost synergies; ignoring them risks producing misleading results.