The importance of procurement negotiations for project success

The allocation of a contract for public construction projects in Europe usually requires a European tender procedure. This has to do with the size, the use of public means and the complexity of this type of projects. Compared to regular partnerships, it is hard to develop trust between the buyer and supplier in procurement situations. Inspired...

Approximating the Qualitative Vickrey Auction by a Negotiation Protocol

A result of Bulow and Klemperer has suggested that auctions may be a better tool to obtain an efficient outcome than negotiation. For example, some auction mechanisms can be shown to be efficient and strategy-proof. However, they generally also require that additional constraints are met which are not always easy to guarantee in practice. It...

Qualitative One-to-Many Multi-Issue Negotiation: Approximating the QVA

When there is one buyer interested in obtaining a service from one of a set of sellers, multi-attribute or multi-issue auctions can ensure an allocation that is efficient. Even when there is no transferable utility (e.g., money), a recent qualitative version of the Vickrey auction may be used, the QVA, to obtain a Pareto-efficient outcome where...