Designing the Japanese Central Rice Market : Theoretical and Experimental Studies

日本三分之一的大米在日本中央大米市场交易，这是一种单边多单位拍卖。参与者是一个发出密封报价的卖家和提交密封报价的买家。所有平均价格超过卖方要价的报价都是中标的，买家按自己的报价付款。自中央大米市场成立以来，他们经历了大米价格的稳步下降。本研究的目的是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。他们是市场上的常客，对彼此有足够的了解。这导致我们将大米市场建模为一个完全的信息竞价博弈，尽管使用这样的信息设置来分析拍卖市场并不是常规的做法。在理论…中另一方面，我们证明了一个市场存在多个纳什均衡，它涵盖了包括竞争和垄断在内的多种配置结果。这意味着，尽管中央市场是一个片面的卖方市场，但它并不总是产生垄断价格。此外，我们还证明了它存在唯一的适当均衡，在竞争均衡的邻域内产生结果。大米市场有另一个特定的规则，它给出了卖家要价的上限。当我们将大米市场看作一个两轮连续拍卖时，要价限制可能会促使卖家在下一轮拍卖中设定相对较高的要价，以避免限制她的选择。我们的实验检验一般支持上述理论含义。这意味着，政策制定者关注的大米价格的稳步下降，可能只是大米市场机制导致竞争均衡的合乎逻辑的结果。此外，要价限制会以不可预测的方式阻碍正常的市场功能。当我们将完全信息下的第二次价格拍卖与大米市场进行比较时，我们注意到，与不完全信息环境相比，受试者的行为可能不同，在某种程度上具有心理上的差异。那么，在这种情况下，第二次价格拍卖和升价拍卖之间的同构是否还会保持下去，是一个相当值得怀疑的问题。对这一课题的探索将是我们未来的研究方向。较少

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