RECO: Representation and Evaluation of Configurable Offers

Up until now, electronic negotiations have primarily focused on the trading of simple goods and services, where products can be described either by price alone or as a set of attributes. There is little support for trading complex, configurable products, such as computer systems, automobiles, insurances and services in general. Companies need to communicate offers including complex rules and business policies, and they need decision support to evaluate these offers. This paper describes RECO, a decision support system for the representation and evaluation of configurable offers. Configurable offers allow multiple values for each attribute and they include rules on how to combine the various attribute values and how to price a desired configuration. From a configurable offer, a user can extract offers for individual configurations. RECO provides a compact representation for configurable offers using prepositional logic, and helps a user in finding the top L configurations based on her preferences. In a multi-sourcing setting, it provides support for identifying the optimal sourcing strategy subject to considerations such as minimum/maximium number of winners and homogeneity of attributes across bids. We draw on mathematical programming, propositional logic and decision analysis.