This research project into Reverse Auction Bidding is the first of the twenty studies completed to this time to use professional contractors. Previous case studies used students at Texas A&M University as the subjects of the research. Reverse Auction Bidding is a new form of bidding using the internet as the bidding mechanism. A purchaser requests bids through a web site, typically a commercial site. Invited bidders can respond under a standard set of timed conditions to the bidding documents on the web site. This TAMU based research program has a SQL Server based web site, which uses house slabs in Houston as a bidding game. This study of The Reverse Auction Bidding method used four individuals from a supply company as the subjects of the work. The methods remained essentially unchanged from the earlier case studies, except that an ASP.NET MVC4 website has been developed to improve the response time and to permit data analysis as the game is played. Each bidder has capacity to bid on three sites at any time, a bidder can purchase additional capacity from the bank to increase the number of allowed simultaneous bids. Each game lasts for twenty minutes, fifteen minutes of game play followed by a five minute break to simulate the work week. Each individual was given a personality test for the review of bidding performance with personality type. The conclusions were that the professional bidders were more competitive than subjects in prior studies, the bidder who made the most aggressive use of the bank loan performed best as has been consistently shown, but the personality results did not match prior findings. Further work with professionals is recommended.
