A practical approach to multi-attribute auctions

In most electronic auctions conducted over the Internet price is still the only decision criteria for the best bid. This is true for all sorts of auctions in the electronic business areas consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B). Especially for many situations in the B2B area there are other important attributes apart from price to be considered for decision making. Therefore the area of multi-attribute auctions gains more and more interest in the scientific community as well as from software vendors of electronic business products. But the approaches offered so far suffer from some limitations. Theoretical approaches are not applicable to (B2B) real world scenarios, commercial software does not cover all situations. To overcome these limitations we developed a practical approach to multi-attribute auctions, that is presented in this paper.