Cotenancy and competition in an experimental auction market for natural gas pipeline networks

This research investigates the use of a "smart" computer-assisted auction mechanism for the allocation of resources within a network of commodity flows. The type of network that we examine has many of the economic properties of the natural gas pipeline industry. In fact this research was originally motivated by specific concerns about the impact of federal regulation on the economic performance of the natural gas industry. However, we believe that the ideas developed here have potential application in other network environments such as electricity generation and transmission, the provision of various transportation and communication services, and scheduling in multiprocessing computing environments.1 Here are some prominent features of the gas industry: