International Journal of Economics & Management Sciences

First-Price-Sealed-Bid (FPSB) are widely used in both the public and private sectors. In a FPSB procurement common value auction, a seller must first estimate their cost to provide the product requested by the buyer and then determine a bid amount by adding a markup to the cost estimate. This markup must consider desired profits as well as informational uncertainties regarding the cost estimates since actual costs of production are known only after the product is produced. In this paper, we investigate the impact of better cost estimates on firm profitability and bidding strategy in a two- and three-bidder auction. Based on field data from over 1000 procurement auctions, we assume that errors in cost estimation follow a normal distribution. This assumption greatly complicates the analysis such that finding an analytical solution is unlikely. Therefore, using a numerical solution approach, we find the equilibrium solution for each type of seller under a variety of parameter settings. We find that advantaged sellers will be more profitable yet submit more aggressive bids. These results depend on the number of advantaged and disadvantaged sellers competing. Indeed, if there is more than a single advantaged seller competing, they will submit very aggressive bids resulting in profits that may actually decrease as each gets better at estimating costs. Our results provide a clear understanding as to the importance of accurate product cost estimates and extends the research on the effects of cost estimation accuracy in procurement auctions.

The distribution of the underground economy in China shows obvious regional differences and has an important impact on the environmental pollution of relevant provinces. The spatial data analysis method is used to study the spatial differences between central and peripheral areas and between developed and backward areas in China’s underground economy, and the degree of provincial environmental pollution has significant spatial dependence. On this basis, the spatial error model and spatial lag model are further used to empirically analyze the impact of the underground economy and its scale on China’s environmental pollution, and the impact degree of underground economic growth on the ecological environment in various provinces of China is discussed. The research results show that there is a negative correlation between the underground economy and environmental pollution in various provinces of China, and the development of and changes in the underground economy and the way it acts on the macroeconomic determine the sustainability of this relationship. In addition, the impact degree of China’s provincial underground economic growth on the ecological environment differs in different regions. The impact of the underground economy on the ecological environment in the eastern and central regions is most significant from the early stage to the middle stage, and the impact of the underground economy on the ecological environment in the western region is most obvious in the middle stage.