Carrier collaboration has emerged as an important way to increase the efficiency of the logistics sector and has attracted significant interest as a research topic in the past decades. Most frameworks for carrier collaboration rely on combinatorial auctions to allocate bundles of transportation requests to carriers. In this paper, we analyze whether combinatorial auctions are indeed needed for this purpose, or additive pricing schemes, in which requests are priced and allocated separately, could also lead to efficient allocations. Using additive pricing would considerably simplify the entire process. Starting from concepts of economic equilibria, we argue that theory does not rule out this possibility even for complex valuations. We then analyze how often additive pricing schemes can support an efficient allocation of requests by simulating capacity-constrained Traveling Salesperson Problems. Our results indicate that, depending on the geographical configuration of requests, this is indeed possible in a large fraction of problems. Thus we argue that the current focus of carrier collaboration research on bundle generation and combinatorial auctions needs to be reconsidered.

中文翻译：

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运营商合作是否需要组合拍卖？


承运商合作已成为提高物流行业效率的重要方式，并在过去几十年中作为一个研究课题引起了极大的兴趣。大多数承运商协作框架都依赖于组合拍卖来向承运商分配运输请求包。在本文中，我们分析了是否确实需要组合拍卖，或者请求单独定价和分配的加法定价方案也可以实现高效的分配。使用附加定价将大大简化整个过程。从经济均衡的概念出发，我们认为即使对于复杂的估值，理论也不排除这种可能性。然后，我们通过模拟容量受限的旅行推销员问题来分析加法定价方案支持高效分配请求的频率。我们的结果表明，根据请求的地理配置，这确实在很大一部分问题中是可能的。因此，我们认为目前运营商合作研究的重点在于捆绑生成和组合拍卖，需要重新考虑。