Procure Financing for Shipping by Auctions

• Main Author: WU, Kekun
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: financial friction; capacity decision; auction; risk averse; Operations and Supply Chain Management; Transportation
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/68; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We study a risk management problem in the scenario of ship procurement. A shipping firm faces a certain financing pressure for the procurement of a new ship. On the other hand, the capacity of the ship excesses the demand requirement of the firm. The firm wants to reduce the payment and control the risk by selling a percentage of capacity to another shipping company. We introduce an auction mechanism for the firm to select the partner and determine the sharing percentage. Acting as the auctioneer, the firm announces a certain percentage of capacity to a set of buyers. The payment from the buyer is determined as the highest bid level except the winning price in a second-price auction. The bidding strategy depends on two signals: the demand and financial fiction. For both the risk-neutral and risk-averse utility functions, we find the unique equilibrium for buyers, and the unique percentage of sharing capacity for the auctioneer. Our new policy not only reduces the cost of financial fiction, but also increases the overall utilization of ship capacity. The numerical experiments illustrate that the percentage of the payments from auction is usually higher than the percentage of the capacity shared to the partner. The firm improves the performance significantly through our auction mechanism.