Method and structure for bid winning probability estimation and pricing model

#1. Field of the Invention

#The present invention generally relates to developing an expected winning probability distribution in response to a customer request for a price quote. More specifically, only the seller's internal historical win/loss bid data is used as a prediction of competitors' pricing and for development of the expected winning probability distribution.

#2. Description of the Related Art

#The foregoing and other objects, aspects and advantages will be better understood from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention with reference to the drawings, in which:

#FIG. 1 shows an exemplary graph using an offeror's internal data for past bids, with the data for the won bids on the left-hand side of the drawing and the bids for the lost bids on the right-hand side of the drawing;

#FIG. 2 shows the exemplary graph of win/loss data after having been normalized and merged;

#Referring now to the drawings, and more particularly to FIG. 1, which shows a distribution of historical bid data relative to competitors, in which the data for the winning bids appears in the left bell-shaped graph 10 and data for the lost bids appears in the right graph 11. This internal data can become the basis of an expected winning probability distribution by reasoning as follows.

#First, the left-hand graph 10, by representing the price data that won the bids, is therefore presumed to be at least slightly below the competitor's corresponding bid amounts. Therefore, by increasing slightly the data of this curve, the resultant shifted curve represents a set of midway bids that would be an optimal winning set of bids. This data increase would be a shifting to the right of the left-hand curve.

#Similarly, the right-hand graph 11 contains the data for bids lost to this competitor and indicates that the data in this curves is at least slightly higher relative to the bid of the competitor. Presumably, decreasing slightly the price data of this curve by shifting the right-hand curve slightly to the left would represent a set of prices that would have won those bids.