Use this version. Email this to a friend. An amazing thing happened to me recently. In the span of one week, I received three phone calls from organizations looking to introduce online auctions into federal government buying.
Industry hates auctions for one good reason and one bad one.
The good reason is that auctions evoke the old, discredited, low-bid world where, for example, the provision of sophisticated IT professional services went to whoever came in with the lowest hourly rates. The bad reason is that by increasing competitive intensity, auctions favor buyers over sellers. Government, by contrast, should be happy about anything that increases the intensity of competition as long as attention to past performance punishes vendors who decide that they bid too low and don't honor their deal. When Part 15 of the FAR was rewritten in 1997, the ban on auctioning during discussions was eliminated, although the rewrite still prohibited releasing a specific bidder's prices without that bidder's approval. In addition, the Procurement Integrity Act prohibited disclosure of proposal information to competitors and could be interpreted as forbidding auctions, although clearly this was not the intent of the legislation.