13. The computer readable medium of claim 9 , further comprising ranking the quantitative degree of satisfaction value for the evaluated bid with other evaluated bids.
9. Computer readable medium storing thereon program instructions that, when executed, cause an executing device to: present a query on a display device of a bidding system to a prospective purchaser; receive a first selection by the prospective purchaser from the query, the first selection identifying a desired item and a first linguistic term describing a degree of importance assigned to the desired item; receive a second selection identifying an attribute of said desired item from the query, the second selection also identifying a second linguistic term describing a degree of importance assigned to the attribute; receive a third selection identifying a first value for said attribute, the third selection also indentifying a third linguistic term describing a degree of satisfaction assigned to the first value for the attribute; generate, by a processing server of the bidding system, said bid invitation document using responses to the queries and the selections; electronically submit said bid invitation document to prospective suppliers to notify said suppliers of the opportunity to submit a bid responsive to said bid invitation document; and upon receipt of a bid, retrieve each attribute from the bid, determine whether the retrieved attribute is a discrete attribute or a continuous attribute, the discrete attribute being associated with a discrete quantitative value and the continuous attribute being associated with two closest discrete values, for a discrete attribute, retrieve the discrete quantitative fuzzy value associated with the discrete attribute, for a continuous attribute, calculate a quantitative value by calculating contribution of the closest discrete quantitative values associated with the continuous attribute; generate a quantitative degree of satisfaction value for the bid, the quantitative degree of satisfaction value of the bid being computed using a weighted method that takes account of a defuzzified weight for importance of the desired item, a defuzzified weight for the attribute of the desired item, and the discrete quantitative value for a discrete attribute or the calculated quantitative for a continuous attribute; and generate a linguistic result to be presented to the prospective purchaser, the linguistic result being based on the quantitative degree of satisfaction value.