A DECISION-SUPPORT SOFTWARE ON BIDDING FOR JOB INTERVIEWS IN COLLEGE PLACEMENT OFFICES

Many university placement offices employ a bidding system to allocate on-campus recruiter interview slots to students. Typically, a student is given (say) 700 points each week to bid on the firms visiting that week. Interview slots for each firm are assigned beginning with the hi ghest bidder until all slots are filled. This paper describes the math ematical modeling behind a decision support system for helping student s to bid in such a system. It has three components. The first componen t elicits a student's utilities of getting an interview with the vario us firms. The second component estimates the probability of getting an interview with a particular firm for a given bid amount. The final co mponent considers our bidding problem as the maximization of a student 's expected utility, which can be formulated as a nonlinear integer pr ogramming (IP) problem. It is shown that this IP problem can be transf ormed into a number of nonlinear programming problems without integer requirements, which can then be solved very rapidly to give on-line bi dding recommendations to a large number of students.