Electronic markets and electronic hierarchies
Communications of the ACM
Design and evaluation of a wide-area event notification service
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
A Law-Abiding Peer-to-Peer Network for Free-Software Distribution
NCA '01 Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA'01)
PYRAMID-S: A Scalable Infrastructure for Semantic Web Service Publication and Discovery
RIDE '04 Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Research Issues on Data Engineering: Web Services for E-Commerce and E-Government Applications (RIDE'04)
Experiences applying game theory to system design
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Practice and theory of incentives in networked systems
Value Webs: Using Ontologies to Bundle Real-World Services
IEEE Intelligent Systems
Information Technology and Management
A Decision Procedure for Bundle Purchasing with Incomplete Information on Future Prices
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
A Multi-issue Negotiation Mechanism with Interdependent Negotiation Issues
ICDS '08 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Digital Society
Managing agility through service orientation in an open telecommunication value chain
IEEE Communications Magazine
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In today's practice, we see readily precomposed commercial service bundles, such as a spam-free email box, consisting of more elementary services like mail storage and a spam-filter. However, these bundles may be suboptimal from the customer's perspective in terms of price and/or the elementary services that constitute the bundle. It would be advantageous to the customer if a service bundle more closely fulfilled the customer's individual requirements, by selecting the most appropriate elementary services included in the bundle. Also, by obtaining the bundle from a consortium of suppliers, rather than just one single supplier, the elementary services of each supplier with the best cost/benefit ratio can be selected. To put this vision into reality, we need middleware facilitating the automated composition of multisupplier bundles out of basic commercial services available online. We take the stand that the business nature of commercial services imposes leading requirements on the technical design of the middleware. Most importantly, the middleware should be fair in the sense that no single supplier obtains a preferred position in terms of service selection to satisfy a specific customer need. Also, the middleware should be able to deal with alternative services as offered by many competing suppliers, not to speak about the combinatoric explosion, resulting from combining the available services into candidate services bundles. We present a list of problems to be solved to arrive at middleware for multi-supplier service selection, bundling and provisioning. Also, we review existing work, usable to build a fair and efficient middleware solution for commercial service provisioning.