IBIZA: E-market Infrastructure for Custom-built Information Products

The merger of electronic commerce, intelligent agent and distributed computing technologies over TCP/IP-based platforms enables the creation of electronic markets in new types of products featuring both human and software agents as actors. One such example is a market in custom-built information products. These are information products that have been constructed to meet specific requirements provided by the consumer. Examples include custom research reports, analysis, and computational objects. How should these markets be designed? What are the market mechanisms that should be used to coordinate the interactions between the actors? What should be the decision strategies employed by the software agents that participate in the market? IBIZA is a computational workbench that enables designers to create and simulate electronic markets in information products. It provides a repository of software agents, bidding strategies, brokering strategies and market mechanisms. Using the repository, designers can instantiate particular designs of electronic markets and conduct experiments to study the impact of design decisions on desired objectives. In this paper, we focus on the key technical and economic issues encountered in the design of IBIZA. We illustrate using examples from our work on designing a software agent-based electronic market for automated model development.