Auctions with Untrustworthy Bidders

The paper analyzes auctions which are not completely enforceable. In such auctions, economic agents may fail to carry out their obligations, and parties involved cannot rely on external enforcement or control mechanisms for backing up a transaction. We propose two mechanisms that make bidders directly or indirectly reveal their trustworthiness. The first mechanism is based on discriminating bidding schedules that separate trustworthy from untrustworthy bidders. The second mechanism is a generalization of the Vickrey auction to the case of untrustworthy bidders. We prove that, if the winner is considered to have the trustworthiness of the second-highest bidder, truthfully declaring one's trustworthiness becomes a dominant strategy. We expect the proposed mechanisms to reduce the cost of trust management and to help agent designers avoid many market failures caused by lack of trust

Mobile-agent based multi-constraint one-to-many bilateral e-Negotiation framework

The thesis proposes a multi-constraint one-to-many bilateral e-Trade negotiation framework. It deploys mobile agents in negotiation, considers trading competition between vendors and search space, efficiently manages the risk of losing top utility offers that expire before the negotiation deadline, accurately evaluates offers, and truly maintains the security of negotiation data

eMediator: A Next Generation Electronic Commerce Server

This paper presents eMediator, a next generation electronic commerce server that demonstrates some ways in which AI, algorithmic support, and game theoretic incentive engineering can jointly improve the efficiency of ecommerce. First, its configurable auction house includes a variety of generalized combinatorial auctions, price setting mechanism, novel bid types, mobile agents, and user support for choosing an auction type. Second, its leveled commitment contract optimizer determines the optimal contract price and decommitting penalties for a variety of leveled commitment contracting protocols, taking into account that rational agents will decommit insincerely in Nash equilibrium. Third, its safe exchange planner enables unenforced anonymous exchanges by dividing the exchange into chunks and sequencing those chunks to be delivered safely in alternation between the buyer and the seller. Each of the three components is based on different types of game theoretic equilibr..