We study a procurement setting in which the buyer seeks a low price but will not allocate the contract to a supplier who has not passed qualification screening. Qualification screening is costly for the buyer, involving product tests, site visits, and interviews. In addition to a qualified...

Most business-to-business (B2B) auctions are used to transact large quantities of homogeneous goods, and therefore use multiunit mechanisms. In the B2B context, bidders often have increasing returns to scale, or synergies. We compare two commonly used auction formats for selling multiple...

We investigate how auctioneers set reserve prices in auctions. A well-established theoretical result, assuming risk neutrality of the seller, is that the optimal reserve price should not depend on the number of participating bidders. In a set of controlled laboratory experiments, we find that...

We examine the procurement process selection problem of a large industrial buyer who employs reverse auctions for awarding procurement contracts. We contrast two classes of commonly used strategies under multiple sourcing; namely, single-stage reverse auctions, and two-stage processes where...

We consider sealed- and open-bid total-cost procurement auctions where two attributes are used for contract award decisions: price, which is bid by the supplier, and a fixed cost adjustment, which is included by the buyer to capture nonprice factors such as logistics costs. Suppliers know only...