Lu Ji and Tong Li, "Multi-Round Procurement Auctions with Secret Reserve 
Prices: Theory and Evidence", Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 23, 
No. 7, 2008, pp. 897-923.

All data are in the file auction_data.txt, an ASCII file in DOS format 
that is zipped in the file jl-data.zip. Unix users should use "unzip -a".

The data set contains highway auction data obtained from the Indiana 
Department of Transportation for a certain type of highway project, 
bridge rehabilitation, from September 1996 to December 2004. It is in a 
panel data format which contains 273 lettings (groups) and 1428 bids 
(several bids in each group) in total. There is an ID in the dataset 
that identifies each letting. This data set is in ASCII format, in 
particular delimited by comma. The variables from left to right on each 
line are id, rp, bid, np, steel, nb, dbe, sot, time, resale, length and 
nb2. An explanation of each variable follows.

Variables and Number of Observations

number of lets with one round: 243
number of lets with two rounds: 30


Variable Descriptions and NOBS

characteristics of lettings

  dbe: DBE percentage goal 273
  time: number of working days needed 273
  np: number of projects 273
  steel: whether the bridge is of steel structure 273
  length: length of the bridge(s), meter 273

prices

  rp: government.s engineer estimate 273
  bid: bids submitted by the contractors 1428

details of bid

  bid1: for lets with one round 1261
  bid1&2: for lets with two round (both rounds) 167
  bid1-2: bid in the .rst round auction that is unsold 102
  bid2-2: bid in the second round 65

participation

  nb: number of potential bidders 273
  nb2: number of bidders in the 2nd round 30

outcome

  resale: dummy variable, 1 if the auction is in second round
  sot: dummy variable, 1 if the auction fails