No Country for Old Auctions

Add comment December 13th, 2007 David Bush - Iasta

I ran across an interesting article, which continued my recent trend of running into a great deal of new content about reverse auctions. Sort of a strange phenomenon, but true. This one was discovered on CFO Magazine and tells the story about research being done to create software which attempts to infer the lowest possible qualified bid by a supplier. However, the article left me looking around to see if I missed something, because it just ends, sort of like No Country for Old Men. There is no attempt to go into greater detail about a somewhat intriguing concept. This is about the best you get:

“Described in a working paper by Sandy Jap, professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and Prasad Naik, professor at the University of California Davis Graduate School of Management, the model — dubbed BidAnalyzer — aims to infer a supplier’s optimal bid; that is, the lowest price the supplier can offer while still making a profit. BidAnalyzer can begin to make such judgments with as few as three bids per supplier, although accuracy improves with more bids and cost-structure data.”

In No Country, I was just getting ready for the big scene and to watch Llewellyn valiantly win the showdown with the baddest man in movies since El Mariachi in Desperado. But, to no avail, it does not happen and I am left confounded to what I missed, just like this article. However, with the movie, I left very entertained and felt like I had spent my 2 hours wisely. The article, unfortunately, left me wondering why the page did not scroll further down and yearning for the 3 minutes back.

I guess I will wait for the sequel of Bid Analyzer to find out what happens to the suppliers.

Entry Filed under: Analysts/Research, Reverse Auctions, Suppliers, Technology