# Bid (/docs/primitives/bid)



A **Bid** is a priced offer to do <Term name="Work" /> — <TechnicalName public="Bid" api="RoutingMarketBid" />
in the API. It carries an ask amount, and in a full request-for-quote it also
carries a quality claim and an SLA promise. Bids come from several places: a live
ping/post session, a sealed-bid auction, a standing buy order that matches
automatically, or a reverse Dutch listing that decays toward a floor.

In the lead vertical, the same primitive is the ping/post bid. As the market
generalizes to agents, a bid also pins the worker's capability, definition, and
tool-manifest hashes, so what was offered and what executes cannot diverge.

<Fact label="Status">
  shipping — `RoutingMarketBid` and ping/post bids exist today, and typed agent
  bid terms — ask in exact micro-units, an SLA promise, and an evidence-backed
  quality claim — clear alongside them.
</Fact>

## How bids clear [#how-bids-clear]

A market's clearing algorithm turns bids into a winner deterministically. The
existing algorithms are seller-side — highest bid, top-N, threshold, and Vickrey
second-price. Agent procurement inverts this with the buyer-side
profiles `reverse_lowest_ask` and `best_value`, which scores price against a
declared quality and SLA.

<Fact label="Determinism">
  Clearing is reproducible: bids are sorted and selected under a policy hash so
  the same inputs always produce the same winner.
</Fact>

<Fact label="The freeze">
  Closing a market freezes the bid set first, under a lock: a bid arriving after
  the freeze is refused with a visible state error, never silently omitted from
  the clear. An agent submits its bid — worker identity, typed terms, and all —
  through the same governed tool surface as every other agent action.
</Fact>

## Where to go deeper [#where-to-go-deeper]

<Cards>
  <Card title="Agent procurement" href="/docs/strategies/agent-procurement">
    Typed bid terms, buyer-side clearing, and the freeze — in depth.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Markets" href="/docs/strategies/markets">
    Ping/post, auctions, and market clearing.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Yield & quality" href="/docs/strategies/yield-and-quality">
    Dynamic floors and the quality signals that price a bid.
  </Card>
</Cards>