24 research outputs found
Social Value Propagation for Supply Chain Formation
Supply Chain Formation is the process of determining the participants in a supply chain, who will exchange what with whom, and
the terms of the exchanges. Decentralized supply chain formation appears as a highly intricate task because agents only possess local information, have limited knowledge about the capabilities of other agents, and prefer to preserve privacy. State-of-the-art decentralized supply chain formation approaches can either: (i) #12;find supply chains of high value at the expense of high resources usage; or (ii) fi#12;nd supply chains of low value with low resources usage. This work presents chainme, a novel decentralized supply chain formation algorithm. Our results show that chainme fi#12;nds supply chains with higher value than state-of-the-art decentralized algorithms
whilst decreasing the amount of resources required from one up to four orders of magnitude.Peer Reviewe
Strongly Budget Balanced Auctions for Multi-Sided Markets
In two-sided markets, Myerson and Satterthwaite's impossibility theorem
states that one can not maximize the gain-from-trade while also satisfying
truthfulness, individual-rationality and no deficit. Attempts have been made to
circumvent Myerson and Satterthwaite's result by attaining
approximately-maximum gain-from-trade: the double-sided auctions of McAfee
(1992) is truthful and has no deficit, and the one by Segal-Halevi et al.
(2016) additionally has no surplus --- it is strongly-budget-balanced. They
consider two categories of agents --- buyers and sellers, where each trade set
is composed of a single buyer and a single seller. The practical complexity of
applications such as supply chain require one to look beyond two-sided markets.
Common requirements are for: buyers trading with multiple sellers of different
or identical items, buyers trading with sellers through transporters and
mediators, and sellers trading with multiple buyers. We attempt to address
these settings. We generalize Segal-Halevi et al. (2016)'s
strongly-budget-balanced double-sided auction setting to a multilateral market
where each trade set is composed of any number of agent categories. Our
generalization refines the notion of competition in multi-sided auctions by
introducing the concepts of external competition and trade reduction. We also
show an obviously-truthful implementation of our auction using multiple
ascending prices.Comment: Preliminary version accepted to AAAI 2020. This version adds (1)
External competition auction for arbitrary recipe vectors; (2)
Obvious-truthfulness proof; (3) Simulation experiment
Balanced Trade Reduction for Dual-Role Exchange Markets
Abstract We consider dual-role exchange markets, where traders can offer to both buy and sell the same commodity in the exchange but, if they transact, they can only be either a buyer or a seller, which is determined by the market mechanism. To design desirable mechanisms for such exchanges, we show that existing solutions may not be incentive compatible, and more importantly, cause the market maker to suffer a significant deficit. Hence, to combat this problem, following McAfee's trade reduction approach, we propose a new trade reduction mechanism, called balanced trade reduction, that is incentive compatible and also provides flexible trade-offs between efficiency and deficit
Chain: A Dynamic Double Auction Framework for Matching Patient Agents
In this paper we present and evaluate a general framework for the design of
truthful auctions for matching agents in a dynamic, two-sided market. A single
commodity, such as a resource or a task, is bought and sold by multiple buyers
and sellers that arrive and depart over time. Our algorithm, Chain, provides
the first framework that allows a truthful dynamic double auction (DA) to be
constructed from a truthful, single-period (i.e. static) double-auction rule.
The pricing and matching method of the Chain construction is unique amongst
dynamic-auction rules that adopt the same building block. We examine
experimentally the allocative efficiency of Chain when instantiated on various
single-period rules, including the canonical McAfee double-auction rule. For a
baseline we also consider non-truthful double auctions populated with
zero-intelligence plus"-style learning agents. Chain-based auctions perform
well in comparison with other schemes, especially as arrival intensity falls
and agent valuations become more volatile
Decentralized Supply Chain Formation: A Market Protocol and Competitive Equilibrium Analysis
Supply chain formation is the process of determining the structure and terms
of exchange relationships to enable a multilevel, multiagent production
activity. We present a simple model of supply chains, highlighting two
characteristic features: hierarchical subtask decomposition, and resource
contention. To decentralize the formation process, we introduce a market price
system over the resources produced along the chain. In a competitive
equilibrium for this system, agents choose locally optimal allocations with
respect to prices, and outcomes are optimal overall. To determine prices, we
define a market protocol based on distributed, progressive auctions, and
myopic, non-strategic agent bidding policies. In the presence of resource
contention, this protocol produces better solutions than the greedy protocols
common in the artificial intelligence and multiagent systems literature. The
protocol often converges to high-value supply chains, and when competitive
equilibria exist, typically to approximate competitive equilibria. However,
complementarities in agent production technologies can cause the protocol to
wastefully allocate inputs to agents that do not produce their outputs. A
subsequent decommitment phase recovers a significant fraction of the lost
surplus