The General Services Administration‘s 18F unit has conducted an experiment on an auction that involved bidding via the micro-purchase team’s application program interface on the cloud.gov platform.
Michael Torres and Alan deLevie, 18F acquisition management consultant, said in a blog post published Tuesday the auction used Amazon Web Services technology and saw an increase in bids from the usual five to seven bids to 70 bids with seven unique bidders including bots that bid against other competitors.
“Our hypothesis was that enabling bidding via API would actually increase activity in a way that would drive down the price of the auction, and bring in more people to participate,” the notice states.
The report added 74 percent of the bids came from bots that included the winning bid at $2,866, which was the second-highest recorded amount ever at the time.
18F noted the team works to add new features such as a bid time extension, time extension notifications to bidders and a small increment increase for automatic re-bids in a push to address the likelihood of someone getting out-bid a the last minute.
