Abstract
In the traditional lot sentencing rule, a buyer arrives to one of two decisions regarding lot disposition; either accept or reject a lot. However, it is more appropriate to consider choices between those two extreme decisions. A clear case where the traditional lot sentencing rule is not flexible is when a buyer purchases a lot from an English auction. In this paper, we propose a model that helps a buyer in estimating the value of a production lot. This model can be used by a bidder before the bidding process starts to estimate the value of an auctioned lot. The model provides an action plan that includes the estimated acquisition cost as a function of the number of defective items found in a random sample. Unlike the traditional lot sentencing rule, the proposed rule is more flexible and provides buyers with wider range of possible actions.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the anonymous referees for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions, which improved the paper significantly.