Reverse Auction Bidding: An Analysis of Case Study for Bid Timing

Reverse Auction Bidding is utilized by a significant number of enterprises for supply of materials and in part construction. This thesis investigates aspects of the Reverse Auction system using the web site developed by others to continue the work on understanding aspects of the impact of human personality types on the bidding results for a standard game.

A game theory was developed for the Reverse Auction Bidding framework used at TAMU to study the results of the bids collected in a standard game. This theory postulated two sub-games exist inside the main Reverse Auction Bidding game. The main sub-game is between the buyer and the set of bidders. The second sub-game is between the bidders.

The theory exists that the buyer seeks minimal costs, which must be acknowledged as prima facie correct for this study. Extent studies at TAMU have indicated that the costs distribution is non-Gaussian, indicating that the buyer?s objective is not achieved for all bidders. The second sub-game is between the bidders, they utilize the non-Gaussian component of the profit distribution to amplify individual returns. Bidders have been proposed into three types, and the personality has been shown to have some impact on the participant?s economic efficiency.

The bid timing data from previous studies shows that the bid arrival times follows a Poisson process. This study aims to confirm the previous investigation that the bid timing data from the Reverse Auction Bidding case studies at TAMU fits the non-homogeneous Poisson process model.

The study involves a game scenario consisting of six construction sites for which the participants were asked to bid on the construction of house slabs. This is a simple and repeatable construction to minimize the problems of bidding. The study also involved determining the personality type of the participants. The game lasts for eight rounds.

The individuals were selected from the Construction Management Graduate program with varied experience. The hypothesis is a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) models the arrival time data for bidding from a number of new TAMU case studies within acceptable statistical limits. The hypothesis is neither proven nor disproven; the results from this study are moot to a large extent, except when included in the overall study of all of the games.