Design of Roles and Protocols for Electronic Negotiations

Support for negotiations in electronic markets is one of the primary issues in today's e-commerce research. Whereas most activities are focused on automation aspects, only few efforts address the design of electronic negotiations. However, for the efficiency of electronic negotiation processes and the success of resulting settlements, it is essential to achieve an a-priori agreement among the negotiating parties about issues such as the syntax and semantics of offer specifications, the sequence of actions, possible responses, or time constraints, because these factors might influence, for instance, the fairness of the electronic negotiation.This paper demonstrates how an explicit and specific design can capture the way electronic negotiations are organised. The organisation design meta-model presented is part of SILKROAD, a design and application framework for electronic negotiations. On the basis of this framework, organisations creating an electronic market or sellers intending to offer potential buyers the option to bargain, can generate, in a flexible and efficient way, customised electronic negotiation systems supporting the roles and protocols designed. Furthermore, the consequent application of this meta-model can lead to the discovery of common negotiation patterns, eventually resulting in a reference model for electronic negotiations.  

Dynamic Testing of Wholesale Power Market Designs: An Open-Source Agent-Based Framework

In April 2003 the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a complicated market design—the Wholesale Power Market Platform (WPMP)—for common adoption by all US wholesale power markets. Versions of the WPMP have been implemented in New England, New York, the mid-Atlantic states, the Midwest, the Southwest, and California. Strong opposition to the WPMP persists among some industry stakeholders, however, due largely to a perceived lack of adequate performance testing. This study reports on the model development and open-source implementation (in Java) of a computational wholesale power market organized in accordance with core WPMP features and operating over a realistically rendered transmission grid. The traders within this market model are strategic profit-seeking agents whose learning behaviors are based on data from human-subject experiments. Our key experimental focus is the complex interplay among structural conditions, market protocols, and learning behaviors in relation to short-term and longer-term market performance. Findings for a dynamic 5-node transmission grid test case are presented for concrete illustration. This article is an abridged version of Sun and Tesfatsion ST07a  

建立可持续性的绿色品牌

为了提升企业形象,增加商业利润,为了在激烈的市场竞争中取胜,商业公司应该基于用户导向的市场策略改变品牌定位,走可持续性发展的道路。努力建立绿色品牌,提供可持续性的产品和服务,在某些特定行业使用新型可持续性绿色包装。  

书籍装帧设计的市场语言研究

书籍装帧设计随书刊市场的变化而发生着变化,形式语言不断更新。本文从书籍的装帧发展引入市场化现状,从书装开本、材料、封面设计、版式设计四个方面阐述关于书装设计的市场语言,并对现在书装设计出现的问题提出一些看法。  

Optimal price zones of electricity markets: a mixed-integer multilevel model and global solution approaches

Mathematical modelling of market design issues in liberalized electricity markets often leads to mixed-integer nonlinear multilevel optimization problems for which no general-purpose solvers exist and which are intractable in general. In this work, we consider the problem of splitting a market area into a given number of price zones such that the resulting market design yields welfare-optimal outcomes. This problem leads to a challenging multilevel model that contains a graph-partitioning problem with multi-commodity flow connectivity constraints and nonlinearities due to proper economic modelling. Furthermore, it has highly symmetric solutions. We develop different problem-tailored solution approaches. In particular, we present an extended Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) transformation approach as well as a generalized Benders approach that both yield globally optimal solutions. These methods, enhanced with techniques such as symmetry breaking and primal heuristics, are evaluated in detail on academic as well as on realistic instances. It turns out that our approaches lead to effective solution methods for the difficult optimization tasks presented here, where the problem-specific generalized Benders approach performs considerably better than the methods based on KKT transformation.  

Optimum design of electronic communities as economic entities

Electronic communities can be designed to organize consumers, to pool their purchasing power, and to guide their purchasing decisions. Such commercial electronic communities have the potential to facilitate the creation of novel marketplaces, and even radically change the buyer-seller interaction, as physical communities did throughout the history. Commercial electronic communities are groups of consumers that participate in the marketplace as a single unit. In addition to bargaining power gained from such bundling, such communities can expand markets by reducing market uncertainty, and they have the potential to drastically reduce consumers’ transaction costs, by facilitating group transactions and bulk purchasing. Communities are characterized by their size, their pricing strategy, and their membership characteristics. Analytical models and numeric analysis is utilized to compute the optimum size of a community for given market characteristics. Two major community pricing strategies are analyzed to improve the community design, and the conditions are derived where one dominates the other. Finally, market segmentation techniques are introduced to control the membership characteristics of the community to further improve the design. Levent V. Orman is a professor of Information Systems at Cornell University, Graduate School of Management. He received a Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University. He has taught courses and written articles on electronic commerce, database management, decision support systems, and expert systems. His recent articles appeared in Journal of Information Technology and Management, Journal of MIS, Acta Informatica, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Database Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Information Technology and Management.  

Engineering of markets and artifacts

In this paper, we continue the dialog started by Roth [The Economist as Engineer: Game theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics, Fisher Schultz lecture, Econometrica 70 (2002) (4) 1341–1378] between economics and engineering in the context of design of markets. We take the position that markets and engineered artifacts are the products of a social process of design formulation. Our perspective is that designing of markets and artifacts follow the same kind of problem formulation and solution testing process. Further, we show using two case studies that the design of engineered artifacts and markets are often interdependent. In light of their similarities, methodologies for modeling and testing using theoretical, analytical, computation and physical models in engineering can inform the development of methods for testing in the design of markets. We also illustrate an example of devising a test and results of its execution thorough the use of a simple computational model of an electric power market. We conclude by summarizing the similarities between the designing of markets and artifacts and call for a continued dialogue between engineers and economists.