A Time-dependent Group Matchmaking Mechanism for Creation of Agent-based Communities

In many agent-mediated electronic marketplaces, a facilitator is exploited to conduct matchmaking in finding agents with the same interests. During matchmaking, the consideration of newcomers and group matchmaking is crucial since favorable newcomers can bring preferable offers to the facilitator for generating better matches and hence maximizing the agents’ utility gains, furthermore, group matchmaking is urgently needed in everyday life for collaboration works. In Choi et al’s proposal, a solution for considering newcomers based on the Markov decision process is presented. However, it is not applicable for group matchmaking. In addition, the notion of individual utility tables and lifetime for each agent to meet the needs in real world has been neglected. Therefore in this paper, we propose the mechanism in the support of all of these requirements by extending Choi et al’s proposal. We also evaluate the facilitator to verify the effectiveness of this mechanism.