Platforms can obtain sizable returns by operationally managing their market thickness, i.e., the availability of supply-side inventory. Using data from a natural experiment on a major B2B auction platform specializing in the $424 billion secondary market for liquidating retail merchandise, we find that thickening the platform’s market by consolidating the ending times of auctions to certain wee...

We consider a smart grid with an independent system operator (ISO), and distributed aggregators who have energy storage and purchase energy from the ISO to serve its customers. All the entities in the system are foresighted: each aggregator seeks to minimize its own long-term payments for energy purchase and operational costs of energy storage by deciding how much energy to buy from the ISO, an...

The main aim of this paper is to select the best portfolio of renewable energy technologies (RETs) for electrifying an elected area which is not connected to any other grids. Minimizing total costs of the system is considered as the main factor in finding the best decision. In order to make the optimum plan more applicable, the technique of life cycle analysis is applied. This technique takes i...

This paper models sequential auctioning of two perfect substitutes by a strategic seller, who learns about demand from the first-auction price. The seller holds the second auction only when the remaining demand is strong enough to cover her opportunity cost. Bidding in anticipation of such a contingent future auction is characterized, including a sufficient condition for existence of an inverti...

For decades markets have been proposed for allocating computer resources in distributed systems like the Clusters or Grids. Nevertheless, none of these approaches has made it into practice. The reasons for the adoption failure of markets are manifold. One reason that has been hitherto rarely discussed is the bidding process. Theoretic approaches assume that the bidders know how to derive their ...

With a large-scale introduction of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), a new entity, the PEV fleet aggregator, is expected to be responsible for managing the charging of, and for purchasing electricity for, the vehicles. This book chapter deals with the problem of an aggregator bidding into the day-ahead electricity market with the objective of minimizing charging costs while satisfying the PEVs’...

As infrastructure-as-a-service clouds become more popular, cloud providers face the complicated problem of maximizing their resource utilization by handling the dynamics of user demand. Auction-based pricing, such as Amazon EC2 spot pricing, provides an option for users to use idle resources at highly reduced yet dynamic prices; under such a pricing scheme, users place bids for cloud resources,...