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Multiple‐Winner Award Rules in Online Procurement Auctions
Author(s) -
Wang Qi,
Feng Juan,
Jiang Xuping,
Xie Jinhong
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
production and operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.279
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1937-5956
pISSN - 1059-1478
DOI - 10.1111/poms.13061
Subject(s) - crowdsourcing , common value auction , procurement , business , set (abstract data type) , variety (cybernetics) , product (mathematics) , reverse auction , microeconomics , forward auction , marketing , auction theory , industrial organization , computer science , economics , artificial intelligence , world wide web , geometry , mathematics , programming language
This study investigates a novel mechanism—multiple‐winner award rules—that are widely used in e‐procurement auctions and crowdsourcing sites. In many e‐procurement auctions, the auctioneer (i.e., the buyer) specifies three rules before the auction starts: (i) the size of the finalist set (from which the winner[s] will be chosen); (ii) the number of winners; and (iii) the allocation of the contract among the winners. We examine how these three rules affect auction performance using a dataset of online procurement auctions across a variety of product categories. We find that the multiple‐winner award rules significantly impact the suppliers’ participation decisions, which is an important factor in determining the economic performance of the auction (i.e., buyer's savings). Most interestingly, these three rules systematically induce opposite effects on auction participation for two types of suppliers: experienced and inexperienced bidders. For example, increasing the number of winners encourages experienced suppliers, but discourages inexperienced suppliers from participating in the auction. On the other hand, raising the disparity in the contract allocation among winning bidders (e.g., from 50/50 to 90/10 split) deters experienced suppliers, but motivates inexperienced suppliers to participate. These findings provide guidelines for industrial buyers and crowdsourcing hosts on how to effectively make use of multiple‐winner design levers to promote suppliers’ participation when designing procurement auctions and crowdsourcing contests.