Properties of bundle valuations in carrier collaboration

Combinatorial auctions are an important part of many frameworks for carrier collaboration in logistics. In the last years, many innovative auction mechanisms have been developed in the economic literature that could potentially be applied in this context and that could significantly simplify the process of determining efficient allocations of requests. These mechanisms rely on certain assumptions about the valuations of bidders. In this paper, we perform computational experiments to analyze to which extent these requirements are fulfilled for valuations derived from a simple logistics problem, the Traveling Salesman Problem. We find that bidders’ valuations typically violate even very elementary requirements, but that these violations affect only a limited number of request bundles. We further analyze whether these violations exhibit a consistent pattern across multiple carriers and check consistency if route lengths are calculated exactly or approximated.