"auction" appeared earlier than... Jesus?
auction is an interesting form of transaction. The seller always hopes to sell things to the person with the highest bidder, while the buyer always hopes to buy goods at the lowest price. As early as 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus recorded the auction of ancient Babylon. At that time, the ancient Babylon city held an annual auction of women of marriageable age. At that time, people would send beautiful women to the market, and bidders would bid one after another in order to get the girl they like.
Of course, this kind of auction in ancient Babylon is more similar to population trading and is more like a crime. The record of the first auction of items in history was that in 146 BC, the Roman army, under the leadership of the consul Lucius Mumius, publicly auctioned the property plundered from the Greek city-state. With the Roman army's war, auctions began to spread between Asia, Africa and Europe.
The subsequent era of great geographical discovery made the world more and more closely connected. Western colonists began to plunder the whole world endlessly, and the primitive and bloody auction began to become a symbol of the upper class.
The black slave trade in the colonial era involves auction
to the 17th and 18th centuries, and auctions have been formed as an industry. In 1741 and 1766, the two world's most familiar auction houses - Sotheby's and Christie's, were established in London respectively.
At that time, there were more than 60 auction houses in London, and the auction industry was very prosperous. Auction regulations were gradually established and improved. In 1677, the UK's "Prohibition of Fraud" set up auction terms. In 1845, the United Kingdom issued the Auction Law.
In China, the commercial act of auction occurred in 1874. The British first set up a Louis Motel Auction House in Shanghai to auction foreign goods and customs confiscation materials, which symbolizes the formal establishment of Western auction industry in China. Subsequently, France and Japan also established foreign companies for auctioning handicrafts and second-hand products in China. However, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, as a bourgeois industry, the auction industry was gradually banned, and the last auction house was officially closed in 1958. The word Auction for
is derived from the Latin word auctio or augere, which means increasing the increase, so in auction occasions, the bid is usually sold to higher bidder (sold to higher bidder).
In daily life, we will encounter auction scenes, such as auctions of art and antiques, as well as online shopping, auctions of bulk items (agricultural and fishery products, mineral products, energy), and even financial commodities such as bonds and stocks can also be auctioned using auctions. It is worth noting that if there is only one item for auction, it is natural for the person who bids the highest price to get the bid, but if the items sold are of high homogeneity and more than one item, then how to auction these items becomes more complicated. The most common methods of
auction are as follows:
British-style auction, bidders bid from bottom to top, the highest bidder wins the bid, bidders can repeatedly raise bids, which are commonly found in Sotheby's art auctions, night market auctions in Taiwan and other places.
Dutch auction, contrary to the previous example, the seller shouts from high to low. If someone is willing to buy it during the process, this price is the transaction price. This auction method is named after the tulip auction originating from the Netherlands, and is usually suitable for auctions with a certain number of goods.
The highest price bid auction method, the participants seal the bid amount, and the bidder can only bid once. When the bid is opened, the highest price will be awarded and paid according to the price. This method is widely used in bidding for land and public works.
The highest bidder will win the bid, but you only need to pay the second-high price auction method. Similar to the former method, participants seal the bid amount to the auctioneer. The highest bidder will win the bid when opening the bid, but they do not have to pay their bid, but they only need to pay the price of the second-high bidder.The economic logic behind
The bidder will reflect his true evaluation of the target in his bidding, and will not deliberately make pranks and make random bids. (The famous economist William Vickrey won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1996 for studying how to produce equilibrium results under the asymmetric information conditions behind this system. Later generations also called this auction method Vickrey auctions in order to commemorate him. However, this auction system also has flaws, so it is rarely seen in actual operation.)
In addition to the purpose of making money, what else should be considered for auctions? The reason why the auction system attracted the attention of economists is that in addition to the interesting auction method itself, it also includes the strategies of participants, as well as the impact and implications of the final auction results on sellers, buyers and society. For example, in the past, government public works often operated at the lowest standard without considering the quality of the project. As a result, manufacturers may win the bid at low prices, but the quality of the project is poor afterwards, or the manufacturer goes bankrupt due to insufficient revenue during the construction process, resulting in the inability to continue the project.
Another situation is that when the government auctions public land, builders often bid for high prices. Although the government's revenue is huge, the sequelae is that nearby land prices and housing prices have also risen, and public grievances have risen. Therefore, when the government purchases projects or auctions land assets, it cannot completely consider the interests of the individual case, and must consider social costs and interests together.
The winners are most afraid of... Winners curse
Especially in recent years, with the advancement of telecommunications and communication technology, foreign governments' sales of the communication industry (different national conditions) have also become a difficult problem. This year's Nobel Prize winner in Economics was jointly won by Robert B. Wilson, an economist at Stanford University in the United States, and his apprentice Paul Milgrom. The main reason is to commend them for their research on auction theory and designing a new auction system, so that governments can adopt the allocation of rare resources such as telecommunications frequency bands, fishery fishing quotas, and airline take-off and landing periods, so that these resources are more in line with the maximization of social interests.
Simply put, in the process of telecommunications band license bidding, since various telecommunications manufacturers believe that winners take all, they are determined to win the frequency band. The price of bidding in the bidding process is often higher than the implicit value of the spectrum. Although the winner wins the bid, it forms a "winner's curse, that is, the winner suffers losses; it may even cause losses to telecommunications manufacturers, or pass on the high bidding costs to consumers, causing the communication costs to rise significantly. These situations are not something the government likes to see.
Synchronous multi-round auction broke the curse and won the Nobel Prize in Economics
In order to solve this problem, Ersen and Migrom invented a new auction method, called it a synchronous multi-round auction system. Its characteristic is that bidding starts at a low price and auction multiple licenses at the same time. The bidding process continues, and the auction of multiple licenses is not completed at the same time when no new price appears.
Due to the rising price of each round, Manufacturers can freely convert the target to choose to bid for . . As long as the bidder thinks that a certain license is still profitable, the bid price will be raised. The auction will not end until all bidders are unwilling to raise the bid price and agree to accept the distribution results. Therefore, there will be no unilateral divergence incentives, and finally the so-called economic equilibrium can be achieved.
The first SMRA spectrum auction was considered a huge success. Later, many countries began to follow suit, and it is estimated that it was 2. During the 0-year period (1994-2014), more than US$120 billion was brought.
Government bonds were taken to the Dutch bid, saving money and reaching the maximum benefit
In addition to the auction of telecommunications licenses, the early government bond bidding system adopted the "compound interest rate bid", that is, those with more bidding interest rates (prices) higher than the bottom bid price set by the Ministry of Finance or lower than the bottom bid interest rate, and the bidding was won in turn. As a result, the government had to pay a higher cost each time it issued a bond.In 2004, the government changed to a single interest rate bid (commonly known as the Dutch bid), and its bidding method was the same as the compound interest rate, but the bidding interest rate was the bid cut rate, and each bidder was the same, so the government could pay a lower cost.
For example, if the government wants to issue 10 billion yuan of 10-year government bonds, bidder A is willing to bid 3 billion with a 0.65% interest rate, bidder B gives 3 billion yuan to bid 3 billion yuan, bidder C gives 4 billion yuan to bid 0.55% and bidder D gives 4 billion yuan to bid 0.50%. In the case of the compound interest rate target, the final result is D (4 billion), C (4 billion) and B (2 billion) respectively. However, the government must pay D 0.50% of the interest per year, pay C 0.55% of the interest per year and B 0.60% of the annual weighted rate, and the average weighted rate is 0.54%. However, in the case of the Dutch target, the interest rate is 0.50% of the minimum cutoff interest rate, so the government only needs to pay 0.50% per year, saving 0.04% of the interest fee compared with the compound order.
After reading so many auction applications, are you interested in the auction system? You can try to come up with new auction methods to make the transaction more interesting and brilliant.
