时间：2010年3月10日（周三）上午9：30-11：30
地点：成人直播
二号楼217室
E-Procurement with Reverse Auction and Ex Ante Flexible Noncompetitive Contracts
Abstract
An increasing number of companies nowadays are combining reverse auctions with other tools to procure products and services. We consider a model in which a buyer procures multiple units of a certain product from a group of potential suppliers. The buyer adopts a hybrid procurement mechanism, first offering some flexible noncompetitive contracts to selected suppliers and then holding a reverse auction. Each selected supplier that is given the contract may accept the offer, and thus does not need to participate in the auction, but must commit to selling a unit to the buyer at the auction price. The contract is flexible in the sense that the selected supplier is allowed to join the auction if he declines the offer. Our model yields some interesting results and insights. We first show that when a buyer offers only one contract, the selected supplier may prefer to accept the offer rather than decline it. We then show that the buyer benefits from offering such a contract, as opposed to simply conducting a regular reverse auction or offering the contract in which suppliers declining offers are prohibited from joining the subsequent auction. When the buyer makes multiple offers, we analyze the resulting game behavior of the selected suppliers and examine its impact on the buyer's cost. Applying our theoretical analyses to numerical studies reveals several important insights about these procurement strategies. This is joint work with Gangshu Cai, Zhijie Tao, and Nianbing Zhang.
Biography
Sean Zhou received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from North Carolina State University in 2006. He is currently an assistant professor in Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include inventory control, dynamic pricing, game theoretic applications, and supply chain management.
