| dc.description.abstract | Traditionally in construction, procurement of products and/or services has been conducted via a sealed bidding format, termed in the United States as a hard bid. With changing technology and time, newer methods are being accepted and applied to the process of awarding contracts for the supply of building construction services. One of these systems is the Reverse Auction Bidding system. The purpose of this research is to study the results of an academic game play using a Reverse Auction Bidding (RAB) site conducted with graduate students in a Construction Management program at Texas A&M University. This research continues a long running investigation into how Game Theory and Personality types impact on the returns from the game.
Nash developed the basic theory that forms the foundation for any study of a game, one of the issues that Nash briefly discussed is personality impact on game play. This research work investigates the link between personality type and returns. Construction contracts are negotiated often by teams, although often a single person has the final call on the price. Earlier studies into RAB showed that the normalized profit results were approximately fitted by a Beta distribution, which is consistent with other studies of auctions. However, a "secondary underlying" distribution appears to provide a linear addition to the Beta distribution for the normalized profit range greater than 0.75. The objective of this study is twofold, to study the game play returns for Guardian personality types and to investigate the underlying game play cause for the linear addition to the beta distribution, which is thought to be of Gaussian form. Three games were played using the RAB web site. The results showed a trend toward the Beta and Normal distributions and the impact of personality was observed in the game results, although the expected dominance of the Guardian personality was destroyed by the profit destroying play of another personality type, who rushed everyone to the bottom of the distribution. The conclusions are that personality has an impact on results and that the linear addition to the Beta distribution is the result of intelligent playing by some players, who impose a secondary Gaussian distribution on the average returns shown by the Beta distribution. Further work is suggested on the Gaussian distribution and the profit destroying play of another personality type. | en |
