AN ECONOMIC MODEL-BASED MATCHING APPROACH BETWEEN BUYERS AND SELLERS THROUGH A BROKER IN AN OPEN E-MARKETPLACE

摘要

A broker in an open e-marketplace enables buyers and sellers to do business with each other.Although a broker plays an important role in e-marketplaces,theory and guidelines for matching between buyers and sellers in multi-attribute exchanges are limited.Therefore,a challenge for a broker's responsibility is how to maximize a buyer's total satisfaction degree as its goals under the consideration of trade-off between a buyer's buying quantity and price paid to a seller,and other attributes.To solve this challenge,this paper proposes an economic model-based matching approach between a buyer's requirements and a seller's offers.The major contributions of this paper are that (i) a broker can model a seller's price policy as per a buyer's buying quantity through communication between a broker and a seller;(ii) due to each buyer's different quantity demand,a broker models a buyer's satisfaction degree as per a buyer's buying quantity based on communication between a broker and a buyer;and (iii) to carry out a broker's matching processes,an objective function and a set of constraints are generated to help a broker to maximize a buyer's total satisfaction degree.Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach.