A Broker-Based Optimal Matching Approach of Buyers and Sellers for Multi-attribute Exchanges in Open Markets

Abstract

A broker acts as a middleman between buyers and sellers in the trading processes to achieve its profit as well as to satisfy buyer's requirements based on seller's offers. This paper proposes a broker-based optimal matching approach in the markets. The major contributions of this paper include (1) an abstract model of a broker agent, that is applicable to a broad range of market types; (2) predicting buyers and sellers' behavior by using Bayes' rule so that a broker can identify an appropriate allocation of items between buyers and sellers; and (3) an objective function and a set of constraints to help a broker to maximize its profit under consideration of buyer and seller's total satisfaction. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach in terms of satisfying buyer's requirements and maximizing broker's profit.