Adam Smith goes mobile : managing services beyond 3G with the digital marketplace

The next generation of mobile communications systems is expected to offer new business opportunities to existing and new market players. A market-based middleware framework has been recently proposed whereby service providers, independent of network operators, are able to tender online service contracts to network operators in a dynamic and competitive manner. This facilitates a seamless service provision over disparate networks in a consumer-centric manner. Service providers select network bearers according to the network operators' ability to meet the QoS target, which in turn is influenced, among other things, by user's price and quality requirements. The benefits of this proposal are the complementarity of numerous network resources, the decoupling of services and networks in a self-organising distributed environment, and increased competition to consumers’ advantag

Electronic marketplace

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 34).by David Yi Wang.M.Eng

A Free Exchange e-Marketplace for Digital Services

The digital era is witnessing a remarkable evolution of digital services. While the prospects are countless, the e-marketplaces of digital services are encountering inherent game-theoretic and computational challenges that restrict the rational choices of bidders. Our work examines the limited bidding scope and the inefficiencies of present exchange e-marketplaces. To meet challenges, a free exchange e-marketplace is proposed that follows the free market economy. The free exchange model includes a new bidding language and a double auction mechanism. The rule-based bidding language enables the flexible expression of preferences and strategic conduct. The bidding message holds the attribute-valuations and bidding rules of the selected services. The free exchange deliberates on attributes and logical bidding rules for automatic deduction and formation of elicited services and bids that result in a more rapid self-managed multiple exchange trades. The double auction uses forward and reverse generalized second price auctions for the symmetric matching of multiple digital services of identical attributes and different quality levels. The proposed double auction uses tractable heuristics that secure exchange profitability, improve truthful bidding and deliver stable social efficiency. While the strongest properties of symmetric exchanges are unfeasible game-theoretically, the free exchange converges rapidly to the social efficiency, Nash truthful stability, and weak budget balance by multiple quality-levels cross-matching, constant learning and informs at repetitive thick trades. The empirical findings validate the soundness and viability of the free exchange

Transaction Streams: Definition and Implications for Trust in Internet-Based Electronic Commerce.

In this paper we analyze how transactions related to the exchange of goods and services are being performed on the Internet. The adoption of electronic markets in an industry has a disintermediation potential because it can create a direct link between the producer and the consumer (without the need for the intermediation role of distributors). Electronic markets lower the search cost, allowing customers to choose among more providers (which ultimately reduces both the costs for the customer and the profits for the producer). In this paper we contend that electronic markets on the Internet have the opposite effect, resulting in our increase in the number of intermediators. We introduce transaction streams, which model how transactions are being conducted and help explain the types of new intermediators that are appearing on the Internet. We also describe mechanisms by which companies are exploring ways of extending transaction streams. To illustrate the model and validate our findings, we analyze transaction streams in the insurance industry and review associated concepts such as trust and brands.transactions; electronic markets;

A Grey-Box Approach to Automated Mechanism Design

Auctions play an important role in electronic commerce, and have been used to solve problems in distributed computing. Automated approaches to designing effective auction mechanisms are helpful in reducing the burden of traditional game theoretic, analytic approaches and in searching through the large space of possible auction mechanisms. This paper presents an approach to automated mechanism design (AMD) in the domain of double auctions. We describe a novel parametrized space of double auctions, and then introduce an evolutionary search method that searches this space of parameters. The approach evaluates auction mechanisms using the framework of the TAC Market Design Game and relates the performance of the markets in that game to their constituent parts using reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the strongest mechanisms we found using this approach not only win the Market Design Game against known, strong opponents, but also exhibit desirable economic properties when they run in isolation.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, and 1 algorithm. Extended abstract to appear in the proceedings of AAMAS'201

Does the Internet Make Markets More Competitive?

The Internet has the potential to significantly reduce search costs by allowing consumers to engage in low-cost price comparisons online. This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact that the rise of Internet comparison shopping sites has had for the prices of life insurance in the 1990s. Using micro data on individual life insurance policies, the results indicate that, controlling for individual and policy characteristics, a 10 percent increase in the share of individuals in a group using the Internet reduces average insurance prices for the group by as much as 5 percent. Further evidence indicates that prices did not fall with rising Internet usage for insurance types that were not covered by the comparison websites, nor did they in the period before the insurance sites came online. The results suggest that growth of the Internet has reduced term life prices by 8 to 15 percent and increased consumer surplus by $115-215 million per year and perhaps more. The results also show that the initial introduction of the Internet search sites is initially associated with an increase in price dispersion within demographic groups, but as the share of people using the technology rises further, dispersion falls.

Automated Auction Mechanism Design with Competing Markets

Resource allocation is a major issue in multiple areas of computer science. Despite the wide range of resource types across these areas, for example real commodities in e-commerce and computing resources in distributed computing, auctions are commonly used in solving the optimization problems involved in these areas, since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes. Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take. Auction mechanism design aims to manipulate the rules of an auction in order to achieve specific goals. Economists traditionally use mathematical methods, mainly game theory, to analyze auctions and design new auction forms. However, due to the high complexity of auctions, the mathematical models are typically simplified to obtain results, and this makes it difficult to apply results derived from such models to market environments in the real world. As a result, researchers are turning to empirical approaches. Following this line of work, we present what we call a grey-box approach to automated auction mechanism design using reinforcement learning and evolutionary computation methods. We first describe a new strategic game, called \cat, which were designed to run multiple markets that compete to attract traders and make profit. The CAT game enables us to address the imbalance between prior work in this field that studied auctions in an isolated environment and the actual competitive situation that markets face. We then define a novel, parameterized framework for auction mechanisms, and present a classification of auction rules with each as a building block fitting into the framework. Finally we evaluate the viability of building blocks, and acquire auction mechanisms by combining viable blocks through iterations of CAT games. We carried out experiments to examine the effectiveness of the grey-box approach. The best mechanisms we learnt were able to outperform the standard mechanisms against which learning took place and carefully hand-coded mechanisms which won tournaments based on the CAT game. These best mechanisms were also able to outperform mechanisms from the literature even when the evaluation did not take place in the context of CAT games. These results suggest that the grey-box approach can generate robust double auction mechanisms and, as a consequence, is an effective approach to automated mechanism design. The contributions of this work are two-fold. First, the grey-box approach helps to design better auction mechanisms which can play a central role in solutions to resource allocation problems in various application domains of computer science. Second, the parameterized view and the reinforcement learning-based search method can be used in other strategic, competitive situations where decision making processes are complex and difficult to design and evaluate manually

Real-time Tactical and Strategic Sales Management for Intelligent Agents Guided By Economic Regimes

Many enterprises that participate in dynamic markets need to make product pricing and inventory resource utilization decisions in real-time. We describe a family of statistical models that address these needs by combining characterization of the economic environment with the ability to predict future economic conditions to make tactical (short-term) decisions, such as product pricing, and strategic (long-term) decisions, such as level of finished goods inventories. Our models characterize economic conditions, called economic regimes, in the form of recurrent statistical patterns that have clear qualitative interpretations. We show how these models can be used to predict prices, price trends, and the probability of receiving a customer order at a given price. These “regime†models are developed using statistical analysis of historical data, and are used in real-time to characterize observed market conditions and predict the evolution of market conditions over multiple time scales. We evaluate our models using a testbed derived from the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM), a supply chain environment characterized by competitive procurement and sales markets, and dynamic pricing. We show how regime models can be used to inform both short-term pricing decisions and longterm resource allocation decisions. Results show that our method outperforms more traditional shortand long-term predictive modeling approaches.dynamic pricing;trading agent competition;agent-mediated electronic commerce;dynamic markets;economic regimes;enabling technologies;price forecasting;supply-chain