Finding minimum-cost circulations by canceling negative cycles
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Brokering strategies in electronic commerce markets
Proceedings of the 1st ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Bidding and allocation in combinatorial auctions
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Design and implementation of an agent-based intermediary infrastructure for electronic markets
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM conference on Electronic commerce
An approximate truthful mechanism for combinatorial auctions with single parameter agents
SODA '03 Proceedings of the fourteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
An Algorithm for Multi-Unit Combinatorial Auctions
Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Twelfth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Incentive-compatible, budget-balanced, yet highly efficient auctions for supply chain formation
Proceedings of the 4th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Approximately-strategyproof and tractable multi-unit auctions
Proceedings of the 4th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Special issue on: New business models for electronic commerce
ACM SIGMIS Database
Data-Driven Agent-Based Simulation of Commercial Barter Trade
IAT '04 Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology
PBS: Private Bartering Systems
Financial Cryptography and Data Security
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In this paper, we describe the operation of barter trade exchanges by identifying key techniques used by trade brokers to stimulate trade and satisfy member needs, and present algorithms to automate some of these techniques. In particular, we develop algorithms that emulate the practice of trade brokers by matching buyers and sellers in such a way that trade volume is maximized while the balance of trade is maintained as much as possible. We show that the buyer/seller matching and trade balance problems can be decoupled, permitting efficient solution as well as numerous options for matching strategies.We model the trade balance problem as a minimum cost circulation problem (MCC) on a network. When the products have uniform cost or when the products can be traded in fractional units, we solve the problem exactly. Otherwise, we present a novel stochastic rounding algorithm that takes the fractional optimal solution to the trade balance problem and produces a valid integer solution. We then make use of a greedy heuristic that attempts to match buyers and sellers so that the average number of suppliers that a buyer must use to satisfy a given product need is minimized.We present results on the empirical evaluation of our algorithms on test problems and simulations. Experiments show that our algorithm (MCC + stochastic rounding) runs in a fraction of the time of a commercial mixed integer programming (MIP) package while producing solutions that are always within 0.7% of the MIP solution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm on maintaining balance and on stimulating trade using two different simulation techniques, both based on transaction history data from a trade exchange. The simulation results support the barter trade exchange rule of thumb that maximizing single-period trade volume while maintaining balance of trade helps to maximize trade volume over the long run.