Special Issue of Decision Support Systems on the Fourth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

The Fourth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’03) was held in San Diego, June 9–12, 2003, as part of the 2003 Federated Conference on Electronic Commerce. Noam Nisan was the EC’03 Program Committee Chair. The conference’s call for papers invited submissions on ball computer scientific aspects of electronic commerce.Q The original Program Committee, consisting of 18 members drawn from across the fields of computer science, operations research, and economics, reviewed 110 submissions, from which 21 papers were accepted into the final program. A Call for Papers for this Special Issue of Decision Support Systems was issued on June 26, 2003. Authors of full papers from EC’03 were invited to submit extended and revised papers, which then went through a second round of peer review. In total, this special issue contains nine papers. The papers are a fair reflection of the current core areas of research that are attracting attention under the broad umbrella of electronic commerce. The field is especially appealing in that its focus on economics and commerce is serving to bring together researchers from broad areas, including from artificial intelligence, theory, systems, and human-computer interaction (to name a few). The integration of considerations from computer science, such as scalability and useability, with those from economics, such as market-efficiency, incentive-compatibility, and game-theoretic solution concepts, is yielding a rich tapestry of problems. Although we are likely still some years from massivescale agent-mediated electronic commerce, the combination of semi-autonomous bidding agents, with