Publication Type

Master Thesis

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

2010

Abstract

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.

Keywords

financial friction, capacity decision, auction, risk averse

Degree Awarded

MSc in Operations Management

Discipline

Operations and Supply Chain Management | Transportation

Supervisor(s)

DING, Qing

Publisher

Singapore Management University

City or Country

Singapore

Copyright Owner and License

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