Double Auction Mechanisms With Transaction Costs For Logistics E-Marketplaces

With policy support and capital promotion,the logistics e-marketplaces in China have initially formed a scale advantage and played a role in reducing the degree of information asymmetry and vehicle idling rate.The latest policy guidance promotes the transformation of the logistics e-marketplaces from the"Matching"information platform to the"Carrying"Internet freight platform,encouraging the platform to participate in the transaction,assuming transportation responsibilities,and generating greater social effects and industry value.However,"Information matching mode"and"One-side bidding mode"used by the current platform rarely consider transaction costs and false quotes from drivers or shippers during matching process,which achieves low overall social welfare.Because the transportation market is a bilateral transaction environment with multiple cargo owners and drivers,this study designs double auction mechanisms for logistics e-marketplaces that considers transaction costs and agents’private information with the aim to achieve maximizing social welfare.This study focused on the truck-load service market,where there are multiple shippers with transportation demands and multiple carriers providing transportation services and a platform.Under the double auction mechanism,the platform collects agent’s bids for a period of time to match freights and vehicles,determine the agent’s transaction prices,and profit from it based on maximizing social welfare.This study proposed a new double auction design framework（MTR-MVCG mechanism）that combines the Multi-unit Trade Reduction（MTR）mechanism with the modified Vickery-Clarke-Groves mechanism.Under this design framework,this paper successively designed the MTR-MVCG^{Ho TC} double auction mechanism with homogeneous transaction costs and MTR-MVCG^{He TC} double auction mechanism with heterogeneous transaction costs.The transaction costs are related to the geographical location of agents.Both of these mechanisms can achieve incentive compatibility,（ex post）personal rationality,（ex post weak）budget balance,and asymptotic effectiveness in a multi-unit transportation service transaction environment.Next,this paper relaxed the assumption that shippers’demand and the carriers’transportation capacities are public information,and proposed a reasonable punishment mechanism to achieve the incentive compatibility with respect to private volume.This paper is the first study about double auction to consider private bidding volume information.Last,this study took transaction market in Beijing of truck-load transportation service from Beijing to Shanghai as a case to verify the effectiveness of the MTR-MVCG^{Ho TC} double auction mechanism.It found that（1）The social welfare achieved by the mechanisms under MTR-MVCG design frame is far greater than One-side bidding mode,and the achieved efficiency always dominates MTR mechanism.（2）the mechanisms under MTR-MVCG design frame can effectively reduce the impact of transaction costs,achieve asymptotic effectiveness.（3）The double auction mechanism tends to allocate the social welfare to shippers and carriers,which can attract more agents to participate in transactions and help the platform sustainably develop.（4）MTR-MVCG^{Ho TC} mechanism and MTR-MVCG^{He TC} mechanism can achieve the same social welfare under the environment without transaction costs or with homogeneous transaction cost,but the calculation speed of the MTR-MVCG^{Ho TC} mechanism is faster than the MTR-MVCG^{He TC} mechanism.