shown in fig1 comprises a client server implementation of the auction which can take place over the internet or over a private network such as an intranet web server 110 has two kinds of clients bidders 100 and the auction administrator 115 there are at least two bidders who participate in the auction the auction administrator auctioneer 115 may be the seller in a seller 39 s auction or the seller 39 s agent or it may be the buyer in a buyer 39 s auction or the buyer 39 s agent a bidder client 100 runs javascript 105 to keep the bidder updated about the state of the auction including the state of the bidder 39 s own bids and the time remaining in the current round the administrator web pages 115 are used to set up auction parameters generate reports and send messages to bidders bids bid cancellations and queries generated by bidders during the auction are referred to the bid processing subroutine 120 acceptable bids are entered using the database server 125 to make changes to the auction database 130 to check bid eligibility or compute round winners the bid processing subroutine 120 collects relevant data from the database 130 enters it into the optimization dataset lp file 140 and initiates an optimization subroutine 145 such as lp_solve solutions are stored in the solution database 135 which is used to prepare reports and determine round results in one embodiment of the invention the following commercial components can be used on the server side the hardware can include a computer with an intel pentium 350 mhz processor 32 mb of memory and a 2 gb hard drive the network can have a constant tcpip connection.