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Presently, a multiplicity of trading systems provide electronic markets with various market rules to professional and private investors in different sectors. This range only partially reflects the individual requirements dependent on the type of product and the environmental context of the trade. There is need for individual solutions satisfying these specific requirements regarding the tradable product, the trading rules and the services. The development of new electronic markets is challenging, since many factors influence the market outcome and hence the markets success. Software tools are required to systematically support the Market Engineering (ME) process. This paper presents the generic trading platform meet2trade that (i) enables users to individually configure their own electronic market, (ii) realizes innovative trading features such as order types or bundle trading, and (iii) provides support for analyzing electronic markets through an experimental system for game theoretic analysis and an agent-based simulation environment for computational approaches. Keywords: auction server, CAME (Computer Aided Market Engineering), electronic markets, market platform, market modeling language

Iterative combinatorial auctions (ICAs) are IT-based economic mechanisms where bidders submit bundle bids in a sequence and an auctioneer computes allocations and ask prices in each auction round. The literature in this field provides equilibrium analysis for ICAs with non-linear personalized prices under strong assumptions on bidders ’ strategies. Linear pricing has performed very well in the lab and in the field. In this paper, we compare three selected linear price ICA formats based on allocative efficiency and revenue distribution using different bidding strategies and bidder valuations. The goal of this research is to benchmark different ICA formats, and design and analyze new auction rules for auctions with pseudo-dual linear prices. The multiitem and discrete nature of linear-price iterative combinatorial auctions and the complex price calculation schemes defy much of the traditional game theoretical analysis in this field. Computational methods can be of great help in exploring potential auction designs and analyzing the virtues of various design options. In our simulations we found that ICA designs with linear prices performed very well for different valuation models even in cases of high synergies among the valuations. There were, however, significant differences in efficiency and in the revenue distributions of the three ICA formats. Heuristic bidding strategies using only a few of the best bundles also led to high levels of efficiency. We have also identified a number of auction rules for ask price calculation and auction termination that have shown to perform very well in the simulations. Key words: iterative combinatorial auction, pseudo-dual prices, allocative efficiency, computational experiment 1.

We address a number of operational challenges encountered in two emerging types of practices in the procurement of truckload transportation services: collaboration and auctions. The main objective in these two types of procurement strategies is identifying and exploiting synergies between the lanes of a carrier's network. In shipper collaboration, we take the perspective of a shipper who collaborates with other shippers to seek synergy between his lanes and other participants' lanes. On the other hand, in procurement auctions, although we take the carriers' perspective in our work, a shipper tries to discover the carrier (or carriers) whose network has the most synergy with his lanes. The first part of the thesis concerns the solution of optimization problems arising in collaborative transportation procurement networks where a group of shippers comes together and jointly negotiates with carriers for the procurement of transportation services. Through collaboration, shippers may be able to identify and submit sequences of continuous loaded movements to carriers, reducing the carriers' need for repositioning, and thus lowering the carriers' costs. A portion of the carriers' cost savings may be returned to the shippers in the form of lower prices. We discuss optimization technology that helps identify repeatable, dedicated truckload continuous move tours with little truck repositioning. Timing considerations are critical to practical viability and are a key focus of our efforts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms on randomly generated instances as well as on instances derived from real-world data. The second part concerns the pricing of transportation services offered by the trucking companies (carriers). We look at the bid determination problem faced by carriers in transportation procurement auctions where a shipper requests quotes from multiple carriers and purchases the services of the lowest bidder. The specific problem being studied is the bid valuation problem in the case where the carrier must place bids on multiple lanes simultaneously. We model the problem as a stochastic optimization problem and propose a coordinate search algorithm for solving this problem. Then, we conduct a simulation study to demonstrate the positive impact of the approach on carrier profits.

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