Auctioning Strategies in an Agent Enabled Peer-to-Peer Marketplace

摘要

Business to business (B2B) marketplaces are characterized by horizontal interactions across the value chain between different businesses. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks consisting of nodes that are peers of each other provide a suitable paradigm for implementing horizontal B2B transactions. In traditional B2B trading, most of the interactions are performed by humans. In this paper, we propose a system where buyers and sellers in a B2B marketplace employ intelligent software agents to procure items. In our system, buyer and seller agents reside on nodes connected by a peer to peer network. In order to discover sellers, a buyer agent sends out a purchase request in the form of a bid over the network. Seller agents compare the bids that they have received from buyers at certain time intervals. They then use an auction-based strategy to determine the winning bid. Our simulation results show that the number of messages exchanged in the peer to peer network is independent of the auctioning strategy used.