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Combining bundle search with buyer coalition formation in electronic markets: a distributed approach through explicit negotiation

Published: 25 March 2004 Publication History

Abstract

In electronic markets, both bundle search and buyer coalition formation are profitable purchasing strategies for buyers who need to buy small amount of goods and have no bargaining power. It is valuable to combine these two purchasing strategies for buyers to obtain greater discounts based on the different discount policies of multiple sellers. In this paper, we present a distributed mechanism that allows buyers to use both purchasing strategies. The mechanism includes a very efficient heuristic bundle search algorithm and a distributed coalition formation scheme, which is based on an explicit negotiation protocol. The resulting coalitions are stable in the core. The simulation results show that the cost to buyers is close to the optimal cost. Increasing the number of buyers who are involved in the coalition formation process does not increase the communication load caused by the negotiation between two buyers.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Bundle price, buyer’s preference and shipping cost: forming buyers’ groups for bundles of productsEngineering Optimization10.1080/0305215X.2023.219010356:5(700-719)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2023
  • (2022)A platform-based structure for group purchasing with bundles of itemsInternational Journal of Systems Science: Operations & Logistics10.1080/23302674.2021.202280910:1Online publication date: 14-Jan-2022
  • (2022)A survey on applications of coalition formation in multi‐agent systemsConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.687634:11Online publication date: 6-Feb-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '04: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Electronic commerce
March 2004
684 pages
ISBN:1581139306
DOI:10.1145/1052220
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • ICEC: International Center for Electronic Commerce

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 March 2004

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Author Tags

  1. automated negotiation
  2. bundle search
  3. coalition formation

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Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%

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View all
  • (2023)Bundle price, buyer’s preference and shipping cost: forming buyers’ groups for bundles of productsEngineering Optimization10.1080/0305215X.2023.219010356:5(700-719)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2023
  • (2022)A platform-based structure for group purchasing with bundles of itemsInternational Journal of Systems Science: Operations & Logistics10.1080/23302674.2021.202280910:1Online publication date: 14-Jan-2022
  • (2022)A survey on applications of coalition formation in multi‐agent systemsConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.687634:11Online publication date: 6-Feb-2022
  • (2020)A Coalition Formation Framework for Platform Cooperatives of Smallholder Farmers2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WIIAT50758.2020.00124(803-809)Online publication date: Dec-2020
  • (2013)Two Classes of Stability — Strong Core and Weak CoreBelief-based Stability in Coalition Formation with Uncertainty10.1007/978-3-642-38215-4_3(29-72)Online publication date: 2013
  • (2007)Emergence and Evolution of Coalitions in Buyer-Seller NetworksEmergent Intelligence of Networked Agents10.1007/978-3-540-71075-2_19(245-258)Online publication date: 2007
  • (2005)Forming resource-sharing coalitionsProceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing10.1145/1066677.1066700(84-91)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2005

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