Multi-attribute reverse auction-based procurement has been widely used by large organizations. The attributes of the auctioned objects are usually divided into two groups: technical and business attributes. They are reviewed and scored by technical and business experts who act as referees in the bid evaluation process. To analyze their bid evaluation behavior, we built a model for a multi-attri...

The recent consumer-to-consumer (C2C) Internet auction boom at eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and other sites has added new theoretical challenges to the science of auctions. This paper uses experiments with economically-motivated human subjects to measure the operational efficiency of decentralized Internet auction mechanisms as they compare to centralized double auction mechanisms. Subjects are recruit...

One of the main activities of humanitarian logistics is to provide relief items for survivors in case of a disaster. To facilitate the procurement operation, this paper proposes a bidding framework for supplier selection and optimal allocation of relief items. The proposed auction process is divided into the announcement construction, bid construction and bid evaluation phases. In the announcem...

The mechanism design problem in economics is about designing rules of interaction for market games which aim to yield a globally desirable result in the face of self-interested agents who may attempt to take advantage of the mechanism in order to maximize their own individual outcomes. This problem can be extremely complex. Traditionally, economists have used game theory and other formal method...

Group buying is a business model in which a number of buyers join together to make an order of a product in a certain quantity in order to gain a desirable discounted price. Such a business model has recently received significant attention from researchers in economics and computer science, mostly due to its successful application in online businesses, such as Groupon5. This paper deals with th...

What are auctions and how are they applicable in Multi-agent systems (MAS). This study reviews the various auction mechanisms such as forward auctions, reverse auctions, and double auctions, along with the roots of the newer auctions that have been evolved over time. Subsequently, a classification of various auction mechanism are presented that will enable us to get a perspective on how auction...

This study seeks to better understand bidding decision support in multi-attribute reverse auctions. It views bidding as a decision making process and attempts to determine how tools that aid different stages of the decision making process affect the quality of the bids submitted. Two experiments reveal that decision support tools that impact all the stages of a bidder's decision making process ...