Performance of software agents in non-transferable payoff group buying

Abstract

Software agents can be useful in forming buyers' groups since humans have considerable difficulties in finding Pareto-optimal deals (no buyer can be better without another being worse) in negotiation situations. What are the computational and economical performances of software agents for a group buying problem? We have developed a negotiation protocol for software agents which we have evaluated to see if the problem is difficult on average and why. This protocol probably finds a Pareto-optimal solution and, furthermore, minimizes the worst distance to ideal among all software agents given strict preference ordering. This evaluation demonstrated that the performance of software agents in this group buying problem is limited by memory requirements (and not execution time complexity). We have also investigated whether software agents following the developed protocol have a different buying behaviour from that which the customer they represented would have had in the same situation. Results show that software agents have a greater difference of behaviour (and better behaviour since they can always simulate the obvious customer behaviour of buying alone their preferred product) when they have similar preferences over the space of available products. We also discuss the type of behaviour changes and their frequencies based on the situation.

A Distributed Mechanism for Non-transferable Utility Buyer Coalition Problem

“…The results are shown in figure 2a and 2b, where we also implemented a related approach [2] for comparison, which is a centralized algorithm for non-transferable payoff problems. It can be seen from figure 2a than the result of our mechanism (labeled DNCFM) is impressive, as it is able to reach a core-stable solution in over 99% of the test cases, whereas, for comparison, the other approach only achieved core-stable result in 97% of the test cases on average.…”

“…The logarithm scaled figure suggested that our mechanism is an improvement over the originally exponential complexity. 2 …”

“…An implication of these assumptions, as pointed out in [2], is that we can define the preferences of the agents solely in terms of the obtained unit price and that what product is being bought. Now, since the resulting price of an item depends only on the coalition size and the item, we can describe each buyer coalition using a (item, size) couple, which we called a bid.…”

“…These approaches are not without criticisms [2]. The main problem here is that an agent's saving may not be a completely accurate indication of an agent's preference for the following reasons.…”

A Core Broking Model for E-Markets

“…Moreover, it takes extra efforts to design a computationally distributed system than a centralized one because 'the additional communication burden of the distributed system needs to be taken on board (Asselin and Chaib-Draa 2006). Some innovations of distributed technology using in e-commerce are discussed in section 4.5.2.…”