Cooperative Exploration in the Electronic Marketplace

In this paper we study search strategies of agents that represent buyer agents' coalitions in electronic marketplaces. The representative agents operate in environments where numerous potential complex opportunities can be found. Each opportunity is associated with several different terms and conditions thus differing from other opportunities by its value for the coalition. Given a search cost, the goal of the representative agent is to find the best set of opportunities which fulfills the coalition's demands with the maximum overall utility, to be divided among the coalition members. Given the option of side-payments, this strategy will always be preferred by all coalition members (thus no conflict of interests), regardless of the coalition's payoff division protocol. We analyze the incentive to form such coalitions and extract the optimal search strategy for their representative agents, with a distinction between operating in B2C and C2C markets. Based on our findings we suggest efficient algorithms to be used by the representative agents for calculating a strategy that maximizes their expected utilities. A computational-based example is given, illustrating the achieved performance as a function of the coalition's members' heterogeneity level.

[1]  S. Lippman,et al.  THE ECONOMICS OF JOB SEARCH: A SURVEY* , 1976 .

[2]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  The Search for Coalition Formation in Costly Environments , 2003, CIA.

[3]  Jeffrey O. Kephart,et al.  Shopbot Economics , 1999, AGENTS '99.

[4]  Katia P. Sycara,et al.  Customer Coalitions in Electronic Markets , 2000, AMEC.

[5]  Katia P. Sycara,et al.  A stable and efficient buyer coalition formation scheme for e-marketplaces , 2001, AGENTS '01.

[6]  John McMillan,et al.  Chapter 27 Search , 1994 .

[7]  Samuel P. M. Choi,et al.  Optimal Time-Constrained Trading Strategies for Autonomous Agents , 2000 .

[8]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Methods for Task Allocation via Agent Coalition Formation , 1998, Artif. Intell..

[9]  R. L. Keeney,et al.  Decisions with Multiple Objectives: Preferences and Value Trade-Offs , 1977, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[10]  Hanna Bäck.  Coalition Formation and the Inclusion of Green Parties in Swedish Local Government , 2001 .

[11]  Kristina Lerman,et al.  Coalition formation for large-scale electronic markets , 2000, Proceedings Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems.

[12]  R. Pierce-Brown,et al.  The economics of Accounting for Growth , 1999 .

[13]  Toramatsu Shintani,et al.  A Group Buy Protocol based on Coalition Formation for Agent-mediated E-Commerce , 2002 .

[14]  J. Bakos.  Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces , 1997 .

[15]  Onn Shehory,et al.  Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees , 2022 .

[16]  Katia P. Sycara,et al.  Mechanisms for coalition formation and cost sharing in an electronic marketplace , 2003, ICEC '03.

[17]  F. B. Vernadat,et al.  Decisions with Multiple Objectives: Preferences and Value Tradeoffs , 1994 .