When selling a business by auction, sellers typically use indicative bids – non-binding preliminary bids – to select a small number of bidders to conduct due diligence and submit binding offers. We show that if entry into the auction is costly, indicative bids can be informative: symmetric equilibrium exists in weakly-increasing strategies, with bidders “pooling” over a finite number of bids. T...

This note is a complementary material for the solution of optimal real-time bidding function in paper [1], where the estimated cost is taken as the bid price, i.e., the upper bound of the true cost. Here we discuss a more general bid optimisation framework with various utility and cost functions. 1 Preliminaries Define the bidding function as b(r) which returns the bid price given the estimated...

We introduce a class of mechanisms, called bidding clubs, that allow agents to coordinate their bidding in auctions. Bidding clubs invite a set of agents to join, and each invited agent freely chooses whether to accept the invitation or whether to participate independently in the auction. Agents who join a bidding club first conduct a “pre-auction” within the club; depending on the outcome of t...

Given the ongoing epidemic and rising costs of diabetes in the U.S., it is critical that health care resources be allocated in both efficacious and cost-effective ways. Among Medicare beneficiaries, patients with diabetes consume .32% of total Medicare expenditures (1). In 2011, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented competitive bidding for selected product categories in...

in this paper, the concept of conjectural variation (cv) is used to specify optimal generation decision for generation companies (gencos). the conjecture of genco is defined as its belief or expectation about the reaction of rivals to change of its output. using cv method, each genco has to learn and estimate strategic behaviors of other competitors from available historical market operation da...

Competitive bidding to derive Medicare fees promises several advantages over administered fee systems. The authors show how incentives for cost savings, quality, and access can be incorporated into bidding schemes, and they report on a study of the clinical laboratory industry conducted in preparation for a bidding demonstration. The laboratory industry is marked by variable concentration acros...

We study variations on combinatorial games in which, instead of alternating moves, the players bid with discrete bidding chips for the right to determine who moves next. We consider both symmetric and partisan games, and explore differences between discrete bidding games and Richman games, which allow real-valued bidding. Unlike Richman games, discrete bidding game variations of many familiar g...

The purpose of Medicare's Demonstration of Competitive Bidding for Clinical Laboratory Services is to determine whether competitive bidding can be used to provide quality laboratory services at prices below current Medicare reimbursement rates. Here, we present key features of the preliminary design for the demonstration. The following areas are covered: scope of the demonstration, bidding proc...

Linear instability and nonlinear energy stability analyses are developed for the problem of a fluid-saturated porous layer stratified by penetrative thermal convection and two salt concentrations. Unusual neutral curves are obtained, in particular non-perfect ‘heartshaped’ oscillatory curves that are disconnected from the stationary neutral curve. These curves show that three critical values of...