Auctions, Negotiations and Hybrid Mechanisms in Procurement

随着信息技术的进步，自20世纪90年代末以来，拍卖在采购中被广泛使用。然而，近年来，拍卖的使用减少，结合（标准）拍卖和谈判特点的混合机制越来越成为常态。这些混合机制是我们子项目的重点。在第一个融资阶段，我们对买方决定的反向拍卖（BDRA）有了更好的理解，即买方决定中标，同时考虑到价格以外的其他标准，如质量。结果表明，在实践中发挥重要作用的动态BDRAs容易形成隐性串通。在BDRAs中，买方的最终决策规则通常存在不确定性，正是这种不确定性导致了串通行为的发生。我们还调查了BDRAs在多大程度上导致买家和供应商之间的信任和合作程度不同于拍卖。我们发现两种采购形式之间存在显著差异。这些结果是通过应用一个模型来组织的，这个模型包含了与他人相关的偏好。我们还分析了如果在采购中使用非透明的谈判而不是有明确规则的拍卖，那么偏袒（即对最受青睐的投标人的特殊待遇）在多大程度上是可能的。我们可以证明，拍卖不容易出现偏袒的普遍看法通常不成立，因为在拍卖中，采购过程的范围必须由负责的代理人定义，从而允许偏袒。在第二个资助期，我们将通过分析混合机制的另一个常用特性——“报价请求”（RFQ）来扩大项目的范围。rfq可能提供有关投标人数量和投标人成本或成本分配的信息。这些信息对拍卖和谈判设计的影响是我们项目的内容。在两个子项目中，将从理论、实验和现场数据三个方面分析RFQ对后续谈判设计的影响。另外两个次级项目扩展了第一个供资期间所做的工作。我们将与项目P1、P2和P5合作，研究谈判协议对买卖双方信任程度的影响。在另一个子项目中，我们继续研究拍卖在多大程度上比谈判更倾向于偏袒，现在考虑主管代理可以扭曲拍卖规则（而不是范围）以偏袒一个投标人的情况。

With the advances in information technology, auctions were in widespread use in procurement since the late 1990s. However, in recent years, the use of auctions decreased and hybrid mechanisms, combining features of (standard) auctions and negotiations, have more and more become the norm. These hybrid mechanisms are the focus of our subproject. In the first funding period we developed a better understanding of buyer-determined reverse auctions (BDRA), where the buyer decides on the winning bid, taking other criteria beside the price like quality into account. We could show that dynamic BDRAs, which play an important role in practice, are prone to tacit collusion. In BDRAs there is usually uncertainty about the buyer’s final decision rule and it is this uncertainty that enables collusive behavior. We also investigated in how far BDRAs lead to a different degree in the level of trust and cooperation between buyers and suppliers than auctions. We found significant differences between the two procurement formats. These results were organized by the application of a model that incorporates other-regarding preferences. We also analyzed in how far favoritism, i.e. the special treatment of a favorite bidder, is possible if non-transparent negotiations are used for procurement instead of auctions with clear rules. We could show that the common perception that auctions are less prone to favoritism does not hold in general, as in auctions the scope of the procurement process has to be defined by the agent in charge, thus allowing for favoritism. In the second funding period, we will widen the scope of our project by analyzing another commonly used feature of hybrid mechanisms, the “request-for-quote” (RFQ). RFQs potentially provide information about the number of bidders and the costs or cost distribution of bidders. The implications of this information on auction and negotiation design are the contents of our project. In two subprojects the influence of the RFQ on the subsequent negotiation design will be analyzed theoretically, experimentally and with field data. Two other subprojects extend the work done in the first funding period. In cooperation with projects P1, P2 and P5 we will investigate the influence of the negotiation protocol on the degree of trust between buyer and seller. In another subproject, we continue to investigate in how far auctions are more or less prone to favoritism than negotiations, now considering the situation where the agent in charge can bend the rules of the auction (rather than the scope) to favor one bidder.