Competitive analysis of online procurement auctions for indivisible goods

This paper studies procurement auctions in an internet setting where the bidders, which are suppliers, arrive at different times and the auction mechanism (or the purchasing agent) is required to make decisions about each bid as it is received. We call this auction online procurement auction. Specifically, in this paper we discuss the discrete case caused by the finite divisible goods and assume that the demand curve of purchasing agent is one of indivisible goods, which is known. Finally, we present the discrete online procurement auctions strategy (called DOPA) for a certain amount of finitely divisible goods. Furthermore, the competitive analyses of DOPA are discussed and the competitive ratio is obtained.