Profit-Driven Matching in E-Marketplaces: Trading Composable Commodities

We are witnessing the dawn and emergence of anew breed of businesses over the Internet, such as electronic intermediaries, which are not only reducing search costs, but also aiming to create efficient markets for businesses and consumers to conduct commerce over the Internet. Among these intermediaries, Electronic Marketplaces are emerging to provide value by streamlining commerce among diverse buyers and sellers and creating fair trading environments. We envision that these E-Marketplaces will play a very significant role in matching buyers and sellers and increasing market efficiency by satisfying a variety of objectives ranging from pure profit maximization to guaranteeing a target market liquidity. In this paper, we consider a specific E-Marketplace for trading soft composable commodities such ass bandwidth and application quality of service, where buyers and sellers submit bids and offers to the marketplace to trade bandwidth products. We develop and analyze the performance of novel computationally efficient matching heuristics. The experimental results demonstrate that these heuristics perform as well as the exact computationally intensive matching algorithms.