Auctions in Electronic Commerce - Efficiency versus Computational Tractability

In Electronic Commerce, the intra-organizational coordination of directly responsible units, e. g. profitcenters or firms within an affiliated group, is of increasing importance. These organizational units can be modeled within a Multi-Agent System (MAS), an interconnection of autonomous information systems. This paper investigates co-ordination mechanisms for MAS in decentralized transportation planning that ensure efficient allocation of scarce resources on the basis of local planning processes. In the domain of transportation, planning problems are characterized by large amounts of data, limitations of time for planning and the intractability of computational problems. Auctions as market-like co-ordination mechanisms are discussed with respect to the trade-off between theoretical evidence on the quality of the allocation and computational tractability.