生鮮品取引における生産者収益改善のための市場設計

抄録

In the markets of fresh foods like vegetables and fish, a Dutch auction is used for clearing a market by virtue of its promptness and simplicity, which are important in trading perishable goods. However, in single-sided auctions, such as a Dutch auction, sellers cannot participate in price-making process. A standard two-sided auction market collects bids from traders and matches buyers' higher bids and sellers' lower bids to find the most efficient allocation, assuming that values of unsold items remain unchanged. Nevertheless, in the fresh foods market, sellers suffer loss when they fail to sell their product because it perishes after the lapse of its time limit. To develop a suitable mechanism for trading fresh foods, we investigate the design of a dynamic two-sided auction market, where bids arrive dynamically with their time limits. Our market mechanism aims at improving traders' profitability by reducing trade failures in the face of uncertainty of incoming/leaving bids. For the purpose, we have developed a heuristic matching rule of the market to prioritize traders' bids based on their time-criticality. Based on the research results, we are now constructing fishery trading systems to improve revenues of fishermen in the areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquakes.