On Local Search for Weighted K-Set Packing
Mathematics of Operations Research
Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees
Artificial Intelligence
Greedy local improvement and weighted set packing approximation
Journal of Algorithms
A stable and efficient buyer coalition formation scheme for e-marketplaces
Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents
Group Buying on the Web: A Comparison of Price-Discovery Mechanisms
Management Science
Comparison of the group-buying auction and the fixed pricing mechanism
Decision Support Systems
Journal of Management Information Systems
Do Textual Comments and Existing Orders Affect Consumer Participation in Online Group-Buying?
HICSS '09 Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Should we collude? Analyzing the benefits of bidder cooperation in online group-buying auctions
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Achieving budget-balance with Vickrey-based payment schemes in exchanges
IJCAI'01 Proceedings of the 17th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
Segmenting uncertain demand in group-buying auctions
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Incentive mechanisms, fairness and participation in online group-buying auctions
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Bidder's strategy under group-buying auction on the Internet
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
Forming buyer coalition schemes with ontologies in e-marketplaces
WISS'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Web information systems engineering
CIPT: using tuangou to reduce IP transit costs
Proceedings of the Seventh COnference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
Forming buyer coalition scheme with connection of a coalition leader
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research
Assessing the benefits of group-buying-based combinatorial reverse auctions
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
An efficient vector-based representation for coalitional games
IJCAI'13 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence
Coalition formation based on marginal contributions and the Markov process
Decision Support Systems
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A group-buying market may offer multiple items with non-additive values (i.e., items may be complementary or substitutable), to buyers who are often heterogeneous in their item valuations. In such a situation, the formation of buying groups should concentrate buyers for common items while taking into consideration buyers' heterogeneous preferences over item bundles. Also, it should permit non-uniform cost sharing among buyers in the same group, which benefits all buyers by drawing more group-buying participants. We introduce the concept of Combinatorial Coalition Formation (CCF), which allows buyers to announce reserve prices for combinations of items. These reserve prices, along with the sellers' price-quantity curves for each item, are used to determine the formation of buying groups for each item. Moreover, buyers in the same group may not necessarily all pay the same price. The objective of CCF is to maximize buyers' total surplus. Determining the optimal coalition configuration in CCF is NP-hard, and the stability of such a configuration relies on the cost sharing rule within each group. We thus propose a heuristic algorithm for CCF based on augmented greedy selections, along with a cost sharing rule satisfying certain stability properties. Simulation results show that our approximate algorithm generates fairly good solutions compared to the optimal results, and is greatly superior to a simpler distributed approach. Furthermore, our algorithm's performance is enhanced when items are complementary or strongly substitutable, especially in settings when the prices decrease either rapidly or slowly with the quantities. Evaluations of the sellers' revenue under CCF demonstrate that sellers should offer a more gradually decreasing price-quantity curve for complementary or strongly substitutable items, and a more abruptly decreasing curve for weakly substitutable items. In addition, sellers may benefit from greater sales generated by simpler price-quantity curves with fewer steps.