The introduction of a centralized institution for trading production rights in quota-regulated agricultural sectors can dramatically improve the flow of information among market participants and increase efficiency. On the other hand, prevailing conditions in these small markets can provide sellers with a market advantage, yielding high quota prices that impose important financial costs on quota holders and limit the entry of new producers into the industry. In this paper, we modify the normal allocation rule of the k-double auction (kDA) to counter thin market conditions and to favor buyers who bid low prices. In laboratory experiments, we test the “truncated” kDA (T-kDA) against a regular kDA for its ability to affect buyer and seller behavior and decrease equilibrium prices, and assess how it impacts efficiency. The results show that the T-kDA significantly lowers the equilibrium price and results in moderate efficiency losses. Most importantly, the T-kDA effectively counters the market power of oligopolists when demand far outstrips supply.

The generalized Poisson distribution with parameters θ and λ was introduced by Consul and Jain (1973) and has recently found several instances of application in the actuarial literature. The most frequently used version of the distribution assumes that θ > 0 and 0 ≤ λ < 1, in which case the mean and variance are θ/(1 − λ) and θ/(1 − λ)3, respectively. These simple moment expressions, along with nearly all of the other theoretical results available for this distribution, fail when λ < 0 or λ > 1 (e.g., Johnson, Kotz, and Kemp, 1992, page 397). In these cases, even the definition of the probability mass function usually given in the literature is not properly normalized so that its values do not sum to unity. For this reason, it is common to truncate the support of the distribution and explicitly normalize the probability mass function. In this paper we discuss the estimation of the parameters of this truncated generalized Poisson distribution using a Bayesian method.