Bid evaluation behavior in online procurement auctions involving technical and business experts

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-attribute reverse auction. With correlations between the bid evaluations of the different referee groups across the attributes, the bid evaluation problem is not the usual multi-attribute decision-making problem. We assess the cause-effect relationship that is present, and show that antagonism between referee groups tends to grow over time. We tested how this works with data from simulated auctions. To diminish the potential for antagonism between the two referee groups, we propose a modified bid evaluation mechanism. We also conducted role-playing experiments involving the referee behaviors as a means for assessing the proposed mechanism. Our results suggest that the modified bid evaluation mechanism is beneficial. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.