A multicriteria perspective on reverse auctions

This is a summary of the main contributions of the author's PhD thesis. The thesis is written in English. It was supervised by Philippe Vincke and was defended on 20 December 2005 at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. A copy is available from the author upon request. The aim of this work is to investigate the use of a partial relations for bids' comparisons in the context of multi-attribute auctions. At first a theoretical framework is developed. Then a specific model referred to as the butterfly model is presented. Finally the concept of bidding niches is formalized and related to the aforementioned model.