AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT
Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality Tender
Atakelty Hailu
School of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Western Australia
35 Sitrling Highway M089, Crawley WA 6009, Australia
John Rolfe, Jill Windle
Centre for Environmental Management, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, QLD 4702, Australia
Romy Greiner
River Consulting,68 Wellington St, Townsville, QLD 4812, Australia
Keywords:
Computational economics, Auction design, Agent-based modelling, Conservation auctions.
Abstract:
Conservation auctions are tender-based mechanisms for allocating contracts among landholders who are in-
tertested in undertaking conservation activities in return for monetary rewards. These auctions have grown in
popularity over the last decade. However, the services offered under these auctions can be complex and auc-
tion design and implementation features need to be carefully considered if these auctions are to perform well.
Computational experiments are key to bed-testing auction design as the bulk of auction theory (as the rest of
economic theory) is focused on simple auctions for tractability reasons. This paper presents results from an
agent-based modelling study investigating the impact on performance of four auction features: scope of con-
servation activities in tendered projects; auction budget levels relative to bidder population size (scale effects);
endogeneity of bidder participation; and auction pricing rules (uniform versus discriminatory pricing). The
results highlight the importance of a careful consideration of scale and scope issues and that policymakers
need to consider alternatives to currently used pay-as-bid or discriminatory pricing fromats. Averaging over
scope variations, the uniform auction can deliver at least 25% more benefits than the discriminatory auction.
1 INTRODUCTION
This article presents results from an agent-based mod-
elling study undertaken as a component of federally-
funded auction trial project undertaken in Quensland,
Australia. The trial knownas the Lower Burdekin Dry
Tropics Water Quality Improvement Tender Project
was developed with the aim of exploring issues of
scope and scale in tender design (Rolfe et al., 2007).
It involved the conducting of a trial auction, an exper-
imental workshop and this agent-based modelling (or
computational experiments) component. The objec-
tives of the project were to assess whether and how
increases in scale and scope of a tender may lead to
efficiency gains and investigate the extent to which
these gains might be offset as a result of higher trans-
action costs and/or lower participation rates.
Auctions exploit differences in opportunity costs.
Therefore, one would expect budgetary efficiency to
be enhanced if tenders have wider scale and scope.
However, auctions with wider coverage might in-
volve complex design as well as higher implementa-
tion costs. Auctions with wider scope might also at-
tract lower participation rates. An evaluation of these
trade-offs is essential to the proper design of conser-
vation auctions.
The agent-based modelling study presented here
focused on evaluating the impact of auction scale
and scope changes in the presence of bidder learn-
ing. The study also explored the impact on perfor-
mance of the use of an alternative auction pricing for-
mat, namely, uniform pricing, which pays winners
the same amount for the same environmental bene-
fit. These auction design features are evaluated, first,
by ignoring the possible ramifications of auction out-
comes on the tendency to participate and, second, by
80
Hailu A., Rolfe J., Windle J. and Greiner R. (2010).
AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality Tender.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Agents, pages 80-87
DOI: 10.5220/0002730500800087
Copyright
c
SciTePress
allowing bidder participation to be affected by tender
experience.In summary, the agent-based modelling
study simulated aucton environments and design fea-
tures that could not be explored through the field tri-
als.
The paper is organized as follows. The next
section presents the case for agent-based modelling
in the design of auctions. Agent-based computa-
tional approaches are being increasingly utilized in
the economicsliterature to complement analytical and
human-experimental approaches (Epstein and Axtell,
1996; Tesfatsion, 2002). The distinguishing feature
of agent-based modelling is that it is based on exper-
imentation or simulation in a computational environ-
ment using an artificial society of agents that emulate
the behaviours of the economic agents in the system
being studied (Tesfatsion, 2002). These features make
the technique a convenient tool in contexts where an-
alytical solutions are intractable and the researcher
has to resort to simulation and/or in contexts where
modelling outcomes need to be enriched through the
incorporation of agent heterogeneity, agent interac-
tions, inductive learning, or other features. Section
3 presents the auction design features explored in the
study. These include budget levels, scope of conser-
vation activities, endoegeneity of participation levels,
and two alternative pricing formats. Simulated results
are presented and discussed in Section 4. The final
section summarizes the study and draws conclusions.
2 AGENT-BASED AUCTION
MODEL
Auction theory has focused on optimal auction de-
sign, but its results are usually valid only under very
restrictive assumptions on the auction environment
and the rationality of the players. Theoretical analysis
rarely incorporates computational limitations, of ei-
ther the mechanisms or the agents (Arifovic and Led-
yard, 2002). Experimental results (Erev and Roth,
1998; Camerer, 2003) demonstrate that the way peo-
ple play is better captured by learning models rather
than by the Nash-Equilibrium predictions of eco-
nomic theory. So, in practice, what we would observe
is people learning over time, not people landing on the
Nash equilibrium at the outset of the game. The need
to use alternative methods to generate the outcomes
of the learning processes has led to an increasing use
of human experimental as well as computational ap-
proaches such as agent-based modelling.
Our agent-based model has two types of agents
representing the players in a procurement auction,
namely one buyer (the government) and multiple sell-
ers (landholders) competing to sell conservation ser-
vices. Each landholder has an opportunity cost that is
private knowledge. The procuring agency or govern-
ment agent has a conservation budget that determines
the number of environmental service contracts.
Each simulated auction round involves the follow-
ing three major steps. First, landholder agents formu-
late and submit their bids. Second, the government
agent ranks the submitted bids based on their environ-
mental benefit score to cost ratios and selects winning
bids. The number of successful bids depends on the
size of the budget and the auction price format. In the
case of discriminatory or pay-as-bid pricing, the gov-
ernment agent allocates the money starting with the
highest ranked bidder until the budget is exhausted.
In a uniform pricing auction, all winning bidders are
paid the same amount per environmental benefit. The
cutoff point (marginal winner) for this auction is de-
termined by searching for the bid price that would ex-
haust the budget if all equally and better ranked bids
are awarded contracts. Third, landholder agents apply
learning algorithms that take into account auction out-
comes to update their bids for the next round. In the
very initial rounds, these bids are truthful. In subse-
quent rounds, these bids might be truthful or involve
mark-ups over and above opportunity costs.
Bids are updated through learning. Different
learning models have been developed over the last
several decades and can inform simulated agent be-
haviour in the model. A typology of learning mod-
els presented by (Camerer, 2003) shows the relation-
ship between these learning algorithms. This model
combines two types of learning models: a direction
learning model (Hailu and Schilizzi, 2004; Hailu and
Schilizzi, 2005) and a reinforcement learning algo-
rithm (Hailu and Thoyer, 2006; Hailu and Thoyer,
2007). These two algorithms are attractive for mod-
elling bid adjustment because they do not require that
the bidder know the forgone payoffs for alternative
strategies (or bid levels) that they did not utilize in
previous bids.
Learning direction theory asserts that ex-post ra-
tionality is the strongest influence on adaptive be-
haviour (Selten and Stoecker, 1986; Selten et al.,
2001). According to this theory, more frequently than
randomly, expected behavioural changes, if they oc-
cur, are oriented towards additional payoffs that might
have been gained by other actions. For example, a
successful bidder, who changes a bid, is likely to in-
crease subsequent bid levels. Reinforcement learning
(Roth and Erev, 1995; Erev and Roth, 1998) does not
impose a direction on behaviour but is based on the
reinforcement principle that is widely accepted in the
psychology literature. An agent’s tendency to select
AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality
Tender
81
a strategy or bid level is strengthened (reinforced) or
weakened depending upon whether or not the action
results in favourable (profitable) outcomes. This al-
gorithms also allows for experimentation (or gener-
alization) with alternative strategies. For example, a
bid level becomes more attractive if similar (or neigh-
bouring) bid levels are found to be attractive.
In our model, we combine the two learning the-
ories because it is reasonable to assume that direc-
tion learning is a reasonable model of what a bidder
would do in the early stages of participation in auc-
tions. These early rounds can be viewed as discov-
ery rounds where the bidders, through their experi-
ence in the auctions, discover their relative standing
in the population of participants. It would thus be
reasonable to assume that successful bidders would
probabilistically adjust their bids up or leave them un-
changed. However, this process of directional adjust-
ment would end once the bidder fails to win in an auc-
tion. At this stage, the bid discovery phase can be con-
sidered to have finished and the bidder to be in a bid
refinement phase where they chose among bid levels
through reinforcement algorithm, with the probability
or propensity of choice initially concentrated around
the last successful bids utilized in the discoveryphase.
Further details on the attributes and implementation
of the reinforcement algorithm are provided in the pa-
per by Hailu and Thoyer on multi-unit auction pricing
formats (Hailu and Thoyer, 2007).
3 DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS
In all experiments reported in this paper, a popula-
tion of 100 bidding agents is used. This number is
chosen to be close to the the number of actual bids
(88) submitted in the Burdekin auction trial (Greiner
et al., 2008). The opportunity cost of these bidding
agents depend on the mix of water quality enhancing
activities that are included in their projects. This de-
pendence of opportunity cost on project activities is
determined based on the relationship between costs
and activities implied in the actual bids. A data envel-
opment analysis (DEA) frontier is constructed from
the actual bids to provide a mechanism for generat-
ing project activities that extrapolate those observed
in the actual trial. For a given bundle of conservation
activities, this frontier provides the best possible cost
estimate. This cost estimate is then adjusted by a ran-
dom draw from the cost efficiency estimates obtained
for the actual bids.
The nature of the bidder opportunity costs, the
budget, payment formats and the responses of bidder
agents to auction outcomes are varied so that results
are generated for experiments that combine these fea-
tures in different configurations. Further details on
these design variations are provided below.
3.1 Scope of Conservation Activities
Changes in scope of the auction are imitated through
variations in the coverage of water quality improv-
ing activities undertaken by the bidding population.
These activities are nitrogen reduction, pesticide re-
duction and sediment reduction. In the actual bids,
the sediment reducing projects came almost entirely
from pastoralists while the nitrogen and pesticide re-
ducing activities came from sugar cane growers. The
shares of nutrient, pesticide and sediment reduction
in the environmental benefits (EBS) score value were
varied between 0 and 1 to generate a mix of activities
covering a wide range of heterogeneity in projects.
For example, to simulate auction performance for a
case where the range of allowed activities is on av-
erage a 50/50 contribution from nitrogen and pesti-
cide reducing activities, a random population of 100
shares is drawn from a Dirichlet distribution centered
at (0.5,0.5). This is then translated into nitrogen, pes-
ticide and sediment quantities using the relationship
between environmental benefit scores and reduction
activities employed for the actual auction
1
.
3.2 Auction Budgets
Two auction budgets are used, $600K and $300K. The
first level represents approximately the actual budget
used in the field trials, while the second budget indi-
cates a higher level of competition or ”degree of ra-
tioning” that can be achieved by increasing the scale
of participation.
3.3 Endogeneity of Bidder Participation
Auction performance is likely to be influenced by the
dynamics of participation. Unless auctions are orga-
nized differently (e.g. involving payments that main-
tain participation levels), one would expect some of
the bidders to drop out as a result of failure to win
contracts. Therefore, we carry out computational ex-
periments for a case where bidders are assumed to
participate even in the case of failure and also for a
case where bidders drop out, with some probability.
1
The method used is an approximation to the actual pro-
cedure based on a regression of reduction activity levels and
EBS scores. This was done because the actual scoring in-
volved adjustments that credited projects with extra points
for other aspects of the project besides nitrogen, pesticide
or sediment reduction.
ICAART 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
82
In the second case, if a bidder fails to win contracts,
the probability of dropping out increases up to a max-
imum of 0.5. However, a simulation that allows for a
one-way traffic (i.e. exit) would not take into account
the fact that the auction can become more attractive as
bidders drop out and competition declines. Therefore,
we allow for both exit and re-entry into the auctions.
Re-entry by inactive bidders occurs with a probability
that is increasing with the average net profit partici-
pating bidders are making from their contracts.
3.4 Auction Price Format
The choice of payment formats has been an interest-
ing research topic in auction theory. Theory offers
guidance on choices in simple cases but has difficulty
ranking formats in more complex cases, whether the
complexity arises from the nature of the bidder popu-
lation or the nature of the auction (e.g. multi-unit auc-
tion (Hailu and Thoyer, 2007)). The Burdekin field
trial, like most Market-based instrument (MBI) tri-
als conducted to date, has used a pay-as-bid or dis-
criminatory pricing format. In the agent-based simu-
lations, this payment format is compared to the alter-
native format of uniform pricing where winning bid-
ders would be paid the same per unit of environmental
benefit.
The auction design features discussed above are
varied to generate and simulate a range of auction
market experiments. Each auction experiment is
replicated 50 times to average over stochastic ele-
ments involved in the generation of opportunity cost
estimates and the probabilistic bid choices that are
employed in the learning algorithms. Results reported
below are averages over those 50 replications.
4 AUCTION PERFORMANCE
The key finding from these experiments is that out-
comes vary greatly with the details of the auction and
the activities covered in its scope. The results are
summarized below.
4.1 Scope Effects
The performance of the auction as measured by bene-
fits per dollar spent is dependent on the scope of con-
servation activities that are eligible. The benefits per
dollar range from a low of 1.91 environmental benefit
scores (EBS) per million dollars to a high of 3.62. An
increase in the share of sediment reduction reduces
benefits obtained; the benefits per million dollars are
always less than 3.0 when there is a positive average
share of sediment reduction activities. The benefits
improve with improvements in the share of pesticide
reduction activities.
In Figure 1, the benefits are plotted against the av-
erage shares of nitrogen and pesticide contribution to
water quality in the projects. The horizontal axis in
the figure indicates the relative contribution of nitro-
gen reduction while the y-axis (diagonal line) indi-
cates the share of pesticide. The residual contribu-
tion is the share of sediment reduction. Points at the
bottom-right corner have higher shares of nitrogen as
opposed to points closer to the top-left corner of the
diagram. Points on the top-left to bottom-right diago-
nal line correspond to a constant combined contribu-
tion from nitrogen and pesticide reduction (i.e. they
represent a constant sediment contribution). There-
fore, points further to the left of the diagonal line
stretching from the top-left hand corner to the right-
bottom corner include higher shares of sediment re-
duction. The dots in the figure show the deteriora-
tion in benefits per dollar as the scope of the auc-
tion covers more and more sediment reduction. Look-
ing at variations other than sediments, the changes in
the heights of the lines increasing towards the top-left
corner (from the bottom-right) indicate the increase in
benefits that occur as the share of pesticide increase at
the expense of nitrogen reduction with sediment re-
duction excluded. See Table 3 in the Appendix for
further details on the results.
4.2 Budget Levels and Auction
Efficiency
For a discriminatory auction with 100 bidders, halv-
ing the budget from $600,000 to $300,000 has a large
effect on the performance of the auction. The benefit
to cost ratios are more than 50% higher for the auc-
tion with the $300,000 budget. See Figure 2 where
the benefits per million dollars for the auction with the
two budgets are shown. The different points represent
results for the different mixes in activities discussed
above. All the points fall between the two dotted lines
which represent ratios of 2 and 1.5 between the values
on the y and x axes.
The benefits of the higher degree of rationing are
similarly strong for all other experiments where other
features of the auction are varied (e.g. pricing for-
mats). Considering all cases together, the benefits per
dollar from the auction with a budget of $300,000 can
be between 40 and 100% above those where the bud-
get is $600,000. On average, the benefits were 67%
higher. The benefits of the higher degree of rationing
(or increased competition for a given budget) are no-
tably higher when the scope of the auction is such that
AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality
Tender
83
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
nitrogen share
pesticide share
Benefits per $Mil.
Figure 1: Conservation activity mix and auction performance.
2 3 4 5
2 3 4 5
Benefits/$M, 600K
Benefits/$M, 300K
Figure 2: Benefits per million dollar for auctions with bud-
gets of $300,000 and $600,000.
it covers higher cost activities.
4.3 Participation and Efficiency
Results for repeated auctions where bidders stay
active even after bids are unsuccessful are only
marginally higher than for cases where bidders drop
out (and re-enter). The weakness of these results
seems to be due to the way the participation rules are
formulated in the simulation, being biased in favour
of bidding. For example, in our experiments, a bid-
der who just lost in an auction might participate in
the next one with a probability of at least 0.5 depend-
ing on their net revenue from the contracts in previous
rounds. In practice, bidders might be more responsive
to bid failures and the results reported here would un-
derstate the importance of investments in landholder
participation.
4.4 Uniform versus Discriminatory
Pricing
Results for a uniform pricing format where every win-
ning bidder gets paid the same for the same environ-
mental benefit are generated and compared with those
obtained under simulation conducted for discrimina-
tory pricing. The key results are summarized in Ta-
ble 1 where we report the ratios of values from the
uniform price auction to those from the discrimina-
tory price auction for both budget levels and activity
threshold specifications. A ”yes” value for activity
threshold or endogenous participation indicates that
the results in the row are for simulation where bid-
ders drop out as a result of failure to win. Each row
reports the results for the corresponding budget and
activity threshold averaged over all the activity scope
variations covered in the experiments.
In terms of performance, the results reported in
the third column indicate that a uniform auction de-
livers benefits that are at least 25% higher than those
obtained under a discriminatory auction when per-
formance measures are averaged over all scope vari-
ations. The relative benefits of the uniform auc-
tion are highest when competition is tight (budget of
ICAART 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
84
Table 1: Ratio of results from uniform auction to those from discriminatory auction.
Endogeneous Ratio of benefits Ratio of first ranked Ratio of last ranked
Budget (000s) participation per dollar bid price bid price
300 no 1.30 0.52 0.45
300 yes 1.36 0.49 0.37
600 no 1.25 0.29 0.51
600 yes 1.28 0.28 0.43
$300,000) and for the case where bidders tend to drop
out when they fail to win contracts.
The higher benefits obtained under the uniform
price auction are the result of the fact that it encour-
ages less overbidding than the discriminatory pricing
auction. This can be seen in the last two columns of
Table 1 where the figures indicate the ratios of the
bid prices from uniform to those from discriminatory
prices for the highest (column 4) and for the lowest
ranked (column 5) bidders in the auction. The first
row results show that the benefit price (bid to bene-
fit ratio) of the highest ranked and the lowest ranked
bidders under the uniform auction were only 52 and
45 percent of the corresponding figures for the dis-
criminatory auction. In other words, the bids under
the uniform auction are more truthful or involve less
overbidding. This is because the bidder does not have
the incentive (unless they are the marginal bidder) to
misrepresent their bid under the uniform auction; sub-
ject to winning, a bidder’s payoff does not depend on
their own bid but on that of the most expensive win-
ner. The disparity between the bids of the best ranked
bidders are highest for the higher budget auction.
In summary, the performance of the auction is de-
pendent on the variations considered in the computa-
tion experiments. To investigate the individual contri-
butions of the different auction features, the benefits
per dollar are regressed against variables represent-
ing the design features. These results are presented in
Table 2 which highlights the importance of the auc-
tion design features, with 93% of the benefit per dollar
variations explained by the design features. Increases
in budgets (for a given pool of bidders), share of sed-
iment reduction contribution, discriminatory pricing
and the presence of activity threshold in a bidders de-
cision to participate all contribute towards lower ben-
efit value per dollar spent. Higher shares for pesticide
reduction activities, on the other hand, increase effi-
ciency.
5 CONCLUSIONS
This study conducted computational experiments to
evaluate the impact on auction performance of several
design features, including: the scope of water quality
improving activities allowed in projects; the scale of
the auction as measured by the budget size relative to
participating bidder numbers; and the choice of pric-
ing format. These design features were conducted for
two cases of bidder responses to failures in auctions.
In the first case, bidder numbers were assumed to be
constant regardless of auction outcomes. In the sec-
ond case, bidders were assumed to drop out with a
probability if they lose in tenders and to re-enter in
with a probability that increases with the net revenue
from contracting that is obtained by active bidders.
The results consistently indicate that auction per-
formance as measured by environmental benefits per
dollar is highly dependent on the mix of conservation
activities allowed in the projects. In particular, in-
creases in the average share of sediment reduction ac-
tivities are detrimental to the performance of the auc-
tion. The environmental benefits generated per dol-
lar of funding fall consistently as the average share of
sediment reduction activities in projects rises. This
outcome is a reflection of the more costly nature of
sediment based activities and highlights the need for
the identification of scope/efficiency trade-offs based
on the nature of conservation activities that prevail
in different industries. It demonstrates that narrowly
scoped auction focused on activities with high op-
portunity costs can perform very poorly compared to
more broadly scoped auctions.
Improvements in the scale of participation are
highly beneficial for auction performance. The ben-
efits of a higher degree of rationing obtained through
higher participation numbers relative to budgets are
very strong. In this case study, the benefits per dol-
lar from the auction with a budget of $300,000 can
be between 40 and 100% above those where the bud-
get is $600,000. The benefits of the higher degree of
rationing or increased competition for a given budget
are notably higher when the scope of the auction is
such that it covers higher cost activities.
Results for repeated auctions where bidders stay
active even after bids are unsuccessful are only
marginally higher than for cases where bidders drop
out and re-enter. The weakness of these results seems
to be due to the way the participation rules are formu-
lated in the simulation as discussed. Bidders might be
AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality
Tender
85
Table 2: Results from a regression of environmental benefits per dollar on auction design features.
Variable Coef. estimate t-stat
(Intercept) 0.00811 60.987
Share of Pesticide 0.00057 4.309
Share of Sediment -0.00322 -20.727
Budget (dummy, with 600K equal to 1) -0.00001 -31.243
Discriminatory pricing (dummy) -0.00101 -16.253
Activity threshold (dummy, 0 if bidders do not drop out) -0.00007 -1.169
R-squared 0.93
more responsive to bid failures than is assumed in the
simulations.
Finally, the use of uniform pricing rather than dis-
criminatory pricing in repeated auctions would lead to
higher benefits per conservation dollar. With uniform
pricing, bidders get paid the price of the marginal win-
ner. Their own bids influence whether they win or not
but not how much they get paid (unless they are the
most expensive winner). This auction leads to more
truthful bidding or to less overbidding. The simula-
tions indicate that with uniform pricing in repeated
auctions, one could increase the benefits per dollar by
between 15 and 55%. The benefits from uniform pric-
ing are especially higher if bidders tend to drop out
following bid failures.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Lower Burdekin Dry Tropics Water Quality Im-
provement Tender Project was funded by the Aus-
tralian Government through the National Market
Based Instruments Program, with additional support
provided by the Burdekin Dry Tropics Natural Re-
source Management Group. The project was con-
ducted as a partnership between Central Queensland
University, River Consulting, the University of West-
ern Australia and the Burdekin Dry Tropics Natural
Resource Management Group. The views and inter-
pretations expressed in these reports are those of the
authors and should not be attributed to the organisa-
tions associated with the project.
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APPENDIX
Table 3: Benefits per million dollars for alternative activity
scopes.
Nitrogen Pesticide Sediment Benefits
share share share per Mill. $
0.00 1.00 0.00 3.62
0.00 0.50 0.50 2.20
0.00 0.33 0.67 1.93
0.00 0.67 0.33 2.40
1.00 0.00 0.00 2.94
0.50 0.00 0.50 2.17
0.33 0.00 0.67 1.92
0.50 0.50 0.00 3.26
0.33 0.33 0.33 2.47
0.25 0.25 0.50 2.19
0.33 0.67 0.00 3.59
0.25 0.50 0.25 2.60
0.20 0.40 0.40 2.28
0.67 0.00 0.33 2.35
0.67 0.33 0.00 3.30
0.50 0.25 0.25 2.62
0.40 0.20 0.40 2.18
0.40 0.40 0.20 2.65
AUCTION SCOPE, SCALE AND PRICING FORMAT - Agent-based Simulation of the Performance of a Water Quality
Tender
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