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Sustainability and flexibility are two main factors not being investigated explicitly by existing winner determination literature. From a fourth party logistics (4PL) provider's point of view, an innovative sustainable-flexible winner determination problem under uncertain demand is particularly studied in transportation services procurement auctions. Based on a multi-attribute decision-making method, a linear constraint related to each bidder's sustainability score and flexibility score can be constructed, and then we integrate an outside option policy to formulate a two-stage stochastic sustainable-flexible winner determination model. Subsequently, we develop an approximation approach to solve the model based on the principles of dual decomposition Lagrangian relaxation and the sample average approximation. Using an established generator to obtain random instances, the effectiveness and applicability of this research could be verified by conducting numerical experiments. Also, managerial insights can be obtained to provide decision support for running an efficient sustainable-flexible logistics system by using a Chinese 4PL firm's real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppliers may experience emotional/behavioral consequences of anticipated regrets that consist of winner and loser regrets in first- and second-price sealed-bid reverse auctions. Constructing mathematical models that incorporate regret theory to derive closed-form solutions of regret-anticipated suppliers’ bid decisions, this paper theoretically examines the effects of anticipated regrets on suppliers’ bid prices, buyer’s expected procurement cost and auction format decision. Comparing with the no regret scenario, we find that winner regret has adverse effects on the buyer’s expected procurement cost in first-price sealed-bid reverse auctions with regret-anticipated suppliers. To mitigate the adverse effects, we propose using the reserve price strategy for the buyer with theoretical analysis and numerical supports. An interesting analysis reveals that as the number of suppliers increases, the optimal reserve price increases or decreases depending on the degree of winner regret is lower or higher than that of loser regret. Also, the classical revenue equivalence theorem no longer holds when the degree of winner regret differs from that of loser regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]