Designing the Japanese Central Rice Market : Theoretical and Experimental Studies

三分之一的日本大米在日本中央大米市场进行交易，这是一个单方面的多单位拍卖。参与者是一个提出密封询价的卖方和提交密封报价的买方。所有平均出价超过卖方要价的出价都是中标，买方按其出价支付。自从中央大米市场建立以来，他们经历了大米价格的持续下降。本文的研究目的在于从理论和实验两方面考察大米市场交易规则的含义，并提出一种能够更准确地反映供需状况的新的市场规则。卖家是合作社，买家是批发商。他们是市场的常客，对彼此都有足够的了解。这导致我们将大米市场建模为一个完整的信息竞价博弈，尽管通常不使用这种信息设置来进行拍卖市场分析。在理论部分，我们进一步证明了市场存在多个纳什均衡，这些均衡涵盖了广泛的分配结果，包括竞争和垄断的分配结果。这意味着，即使中央市场是一个单方面的卖方市场，它也并不总是产生垄断价格。进一步，我们证明了它在竞争均衡的近邻上有唯一的适当均衡产生结果。大米市场还有一个特殊的规则，即卖方的要价有一个上限。当我们把大米市场看作是一个两轮连续拍卖时，卖出价限制可能会促使卖者设定一个相对较高的开始卖价，以避免限制她在下一轮的选择。我们的实验检验大体上支持上述理论推论。这意味着，决策者所关心的稻米价格的稳定下降，可能只是导致竞争均衡的稻米市场机制的一个合乎逻辑的结果。此外，限价会以不可预测的方式阻碍市场的正常功能。当我们将第二价格拍卖与完全信息下的大米市场进行比较时，我们注意到，与不完全信息设置相比，受试者的行为可能会有所不同，这在某种程度上是心理上的。那么，在这种情况下，二次价格拍卖与升标拍卖之间的同构性是否还能保持下去就很值得怀疑了。对这一课题的探索将是我们今后的研究方向。少

One third of Japanese rice is transacted in Japanese central rice market, which is a one-sided multi-unit auction. Participants are one seller who places a sealed ask bid and buyers who submit sealed offer bids. All the offers whose average exceeds seller's ask bid are winning bids, and buyers pay at their bids. Ever since the central rice market was established, they have experienced a steady decline of rice prices. The object of this research is to examine implications of the transaction rules of rice market theoretically as well as experimentally, and propose a new market rule which is capable of reflecting demand and supply conditions more accurately.The seller is a co-op and buyers are wholesalers. They are regulars in a market, and possess quite sufficient amount of knowledge about each other. This leads us to model the rice market as a complete information bidding game, though it is not conventional to employ such information setting for auction market analysis. In the theoretic … More al part, we show that a market has multiple Nash equilibria that covers a wide range of allocation outcomes including both competitive and monopolistic ones. It implies that even though the central market is a one-sided seller's market, it does not always generate monopoly price. Furthermore, we show that it has unique proper equilibrium generating outcomes in the close neighborhood of competitive equilibrium.The rice market has another particular rule that gives a ceiling to the seller's ask price. When we look at a rice market as a two round sequential auction, the ask price restriction may induce the seller to place a beginning ask price relatively high in order to avoid limiting her choice in the next round.Our experimental examinations generally support the above theoretical implications. This implies that the steady decline of rice prices, with which policy makers are concerned, may only be a logical consequence of rice market mechanism hat induces competitive equilibrium. In addition, having ask price restriction would obstruct the proper market function, in unpredictable way.As we investigating the second-price auction in comparison with the rice market under the complete information, we have noticed that subjects may behave differently compared to the incomplete information setting, in a respect somewhat psychological. Then, it is quite questionable whether the isomorphism between the second price auction and the ascending bid auction would still be maintained under such circumstances. Exploration on this topic will be of our future research. Less