SPONSORED REPORT SERIES Auction and Game Theory Based Recommendations for DOD Acquisitions

to become a research sponsor, or to print additional copies of reports, please contact any of the staff listed on the Acquisition Research Program website (www.acquisitionresearch.net). Acquisition Research Program Graduate School of Business & Public Policy- i-Naval Postgraduate School This paper synthesizes auction and game theory literature into specific military acquisition improvement recommendations. We characterize acquisition environments into distinct categories, present the results of seminal literature that pertains to each category, and translate the literatures ’ recommendations for military contracting practitioners. The relevant categories are procurement with unknown cost and no risk, item(s) with known costs and existent but understood stochastic risk, and item(s) with unknown costs and/or unknown stochastic risk. We break out these three categories into sub-categories depending on whether there are one o