Auctions in Pricing Excludable Public Goods

排他性公共物品定价拍卖

• 批准号: 9709590
• 负责人: Laura Razzolini
• 金额: $ 1.8万
• 依托单位: University of Mississippi
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1997
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1997-07-01 至 1998-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9709590&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Auctions; Pricing; Excludable; Public; Goods

In this project we study the use of auction mechanisms to provide a public project for a soci ety with multiple individuals. We consider a public project that can be consumed without rivalry by all agents but where exclusion of individuals is pos sible. We adopt excludability as an instrument of economic policy in order to ensure obtain voluntary participation by the individuals in the project. While the infor mation about the cost of the project can generally be assumed known to the planner, we allow the in formation about the agents' preferences and endow ments to be private. In this framework, the issues become whether or not to provide the excludable public good, whom to include, and how the costs of provision are to be shared. We borrow from the theory of auctions to charac terize two `auction-like` mechanisms for allocating excludable public goods. The first is a mechanism based on the increasing-bid, English auction we call the `English Auction-Like Mechanism.` The second is a mechanism based on Vickrey's second-price, sealed bid auction we call the `Sealed Bid Auction-Like Mechanism.` We show that, as in Vickrey (1961), the English Auction-Like Mechanism and the Sealed Bid Auction-Like Mechanism are strategy proof, and that they lead to equivalent outcomes. Moreover, the latter is closely related to the serial cost sharing rule and the conser vative equal cost rule, proposed by Moulin (1994). We extend his model by limiting the number of individuals who may consume the good non-rivalrously; that is, by introducing congestion in consumption. Prices play a dual role of in ducing truthful preference revelation and of a ra tioning device to allocate the good. The contributions of the project are two: to show that rules suggested by Moulin and Vickrey belong to the same family of extended auction-like mechanisms, thereby unifying two previously separate branches in the literature on mechanism design; and to character ize two well-defined auction-like mechanisms which can be shown to be easy to implement. This project constitutes the point of departure for a systematic analysis of strategy-proof mechanisms for allocating and pricing excludable public goods. This is an important direction which will ultimately result in a better understanding of cost sharing rules, their performance characteristics, and the ways in which they can be practically implemented. The re sults from this investigation have the potential to affect meaningfully the way private and public or ganizations allocate scarce resources to finance ac tivities such as computer networks, telecommunica tions systems, political parties, museums, libraries, schools, etc. These extensions will be the topic of a future full NSF proposal.

在这个项目中，我们研究使用拍卖机制为一个有多个个体的社会提供公共项目。我们考虑一个公共项目，它可以由所有代理在没有竞争的情况下消费，但个人可能被排除在外。我们采用排他性作为经济政策的工具，以确保个人在项目中获得自愿参与。虽然有关项目成本的信息通常可以假定为规划人员所知，但我们允许有关代理的偏好和禀赋的信息是私有的。在这个框架下，问题变成了是否提供排他性公共产品，包括谁，以及如何分担提供的成本。我们借用拍卖理论来描述两种“类似拍卖”的分配排他性公共物品的机制。第一种是基于出价递增的英式拍卖机制，我们称之为“英式拍卖机制”。第二种是基于维克瑞的第二价格密封竞价拍卖的机制，我们称之为“类似密封竞价拍卖的机制”。正如Vickrey（1961）所述，我们表明，英式类拍卖机制和密封竞价类拍卖机制是策略证明，它们会导致相同的结果。此外，后者与Moulin（1994）提出的连续成本分担规则和保守等成本规则密切相关。我们通过限制非竞争性消费商品的个体数量来扩展他的模型；也就是说，通过在消费中引入拥堵。价格具有揭示真实偏好和配置商品的调节机制的双重作用。该项目的贡献有两个：表明Moulin和Vickrey提出的规则属于扩展拍卖类机制的同一家族，从而统一了机制设计文献中两个先前独立的分支；并描述两种定义良好的类似拍卖的机制，它们可以被证明是容易实现的。这个项目是系统分析排除性公共物品的分配和定价机制的出发点。这是一个重要的方向，最终将使人们更好地了解费用分摊规则、其执行特点以及实际执行这些规则的方式。这项调查的结果有可能对私人和公共或组织分配稀缺资源的方式产生有意义的影响，以资助计算机网络、电信系统、政党、博物馆、图书馆、学校等活动。这些扩展将成为未来NSF完整提案的主题。