We discuss the design of a hybrid mechanism for e-procurement, which implements a multi-attribute combinatorial auction, followed by a bargaining process to achieve desirable procurement transaction outcomes. For the auction phase of the mechanism, we discuss incentive-compatible bidding strategies for suppliers, and how the buyer should determine the winning suppliers. In the follow-on bargain...

Real-time auction has become an important online advertising trading mechanism. A crucial issue for advertisers is to model the market competition, i.e., bid landscape forecasting. It is formulated as predicting the market price distribution for each ad auction provided by its side information. Existing solutions mainly focus on parameterized heuristic forms of the market price distribution and...

Government agencies use variants of the first-price sealed-bid auction mechanism to realize low cost, high quality, and on-time delivery when procuring goods and services. In a commonly used approach, agencies announce an incentive function that determines the amount they will pay based on the realized value of an attribute of the work performed, but bids do not explicitly include this attribut...

We consider a multi-attribute outsourcing economy where both price and delivery date are relevant decision factors. In the economy, there is an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) who needs multiple items to be delivered on the predetermined delivery dates and suppliers who are capable of delivering some or all of the items. We first show that there exists a competitive equilibrium in this ec...

We develop a system for attribute-based prediction of final (online) auction pricing, focusing on the eBay laptop category. The system implements a featureweighted k-NN algorithm, using evolutionary computation to determine feature weights, with prior trades used as training data. The resulting average prediction error is 16%. Mostly automatic trading using the system greatly reduces the time a...

Comparative studies of auction and negotiation exchange mechanisms are inconclusive. These studies have typically compared outcomes obtained from the two mechanisms. The question which this paper aims to address is the viability of outcome-based comparisons. Such comparisons assume that both mechanisms produce the same types of outcomes but their values differ. An argument can be made that this...

This paper first describes a few existing models for product and merchant brokering and automated negotiation in the framework of agent-based emarketplaces. Our analysis shows that only simplest types of automated negotiation protocols are currently presented online, whereas some powerful systems have been already implemented in the product and merchant brokering field. Then we give an overview...

Social concerns about the environment and global warming suggest that industries must focus on reducing energy consumption, due to its social impact and changing laws. Furthermore, the smart grid will bring time-dependent tariffs that pose new challenges to the optimisation of resource allocation. In this paper we address the problem of optimising energy consumption in manufacturing processes b...

This paper first describes a few existing models for product and merchant brokering and automated negotiation in the framework of agent-based e-marketplaces. Our analysis shows that only simplest types of automated negotiation protocols are currently presented online, whereas some powerful systems have been already implemented in the product and merchant brokering field. Then we give an overvie...

In 5G and beyond, the newly emerging services, such as edge computing/intelligence may demand provision of heterogeneous communications, computing, storage (CCS) resources on across network entities multihop apart. cases, traditional resource-oriented auction schemes, where buyers place bids resources, not be effective in providing end-to-end (E2E) quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. To overco...