Market Mechanism for Trading Perishable Goods

A standard double auction market collects bids from traders and matches them to find the most efficient allocation, assuming that the value of unsold items remains unchanged. In the market for perishable goods, sellers suffer a loss when they fail to sell their goods, because their salvage values are lost when the goods perish. To solve this problem, we investigate the design of an online double auction for perishable goods, where bids arrive dynamically with their time limits. Our market mechanism aims at improving the profitability of traders by reducing trade failures in the face of uncertainty of incoming/departing bids.