基于多物品委托拍卖的供应链协调研究

Coordinating the Supply Chain in a Multi-Unit Consignment Auction

基于微分博弈理论研究了单一卖方和单一拍卖行组成的二级多物品拍卖供应链的契约协调问题。首先,从理论上证明了传统的佣金契约无法协调供应链。然后,提出了一种全新的收益补偿契约:商品售出时,拍卖行返还给卖方定额收益;商品流拍时,给予卖方流拍补偿金。分析表明,收益补偿契约在非合作博弈下无法协调供应链,但在合作博弈下可以协调供应链,最优契约参数间呈线性关系。此时,卖方和拍卖行的利润分配比例受谈判能力和谈判砝码的共同影响,调节流拍补偿金可调整双方各自承担的系统风险的大小。最后,通过算例分析验证了上述结论。

Auction houses play some important roles in gathering and releasing information about supply and demand,valuing commodity valuation,and supervising auction processes.As a result,more and more sellers tend to entrust a third-party auction house to replace themselves for organizing auction activities.The coordination of a supply chain with a seller and an auction house is studied.The seller consigns his homogeneous commodities to the auction house.The auction house sells the commodities by a discriminatory auction with a secret reservation price.The centralized decision-making is taken as the benchmark of the supply chain optimal strategy.Analytical results show that the optimal reservation price is independent of both the supply quantity and the buyers'bids distribution.For a commodity,to auction it successfully is superior to hold it if its auction price is larger than its salvage value.Furthermore,the seller should balance the single expected revenue of a commodity with the accumulated revenue of multiple commodities,as the buyers'bids decrease with the commodity quantity.Thus,the seller should choose the optimal supply quantity to maximize his auction revenue.Then the supply chain coordination is investigated with the auction commission contract,in which the auction house charges the seller a commission for each successful transaction.If a commodity is unsold,it will return to the seller.The analysis shows that the seller submits his reservation price is not on the basis of the buyers'real bids.The seller also takes his commission and the commission of the buyers into account.Thus,his reservation price is not optimal,and thereby the supply chain cannot be coordinated with the auction commission contract.A new sales-subsidy contract is proposed to coordinate the supply chain.In the sales-subsidy contract,the seller gains fixed revenue return from the auction house if a commodity is auctioned successfully,and the seller is simultaneously subsidized by the auction house if a commodity is unsold.The supply chain optimal strategy is discussed in the case of noncooperative and cooperative games,respectively.In the noncooperative game,the seller offers the supply quantity,i.e.acts as a leader,and then the auction house submits reservation price,i.e.acts as a follower.In the cooperative game,the seller and the auction house make joint decisions of the supply quantity and the reservation price,i.e.they are cooperative partners.The analysis shows that the sales-subsidy contract cannot coordinate the supply chain in the noncooperative game,whereas can coordinate the supply chain in the cooperative game.On the linear frontier of the optimal contract parameters,the profit distribution between the seller and the auction house is determined by the bargaining strength and power.Adjusting the subsidy amount can balance the risk burden between the seller and the auction house.At the end of the paper,a numerical example is provided to verify the above conclusions.The contributions of this paper are as follows.First,the interaction and profit allocation between the seller and the auction house in a multi-unit consignment auction are discussed.Second,the optimal strategic responses between the seller and the auction house to the sales-subsidy contract are investigated in the case of noncooperative and cooperative games,respectively.Third,some useful managerial insights are obtained:the traditional auction commission contract distorts bidding information from the buyers to the seller,whereas the sales-subsidy mechanism promotes the communication and cooperation between the seller and the auction house,and then optimizes the performance of the whole supply chain.