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Abstracts - 3rd USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce
The Auction Manager: Market Middleware for Large-Scale Electronic Commerce
Tracy Mullen and Michael P. Wellman
University of Michigan
Abstract
As the number and diversity of electronic commerce participants grows,
the complexity of purchasing from a vast and dynamic array of goods and
services needs to be hidden from the end user.
Putting the complexity into the commerce system instead means providing
flexible middleware for enabling commerce within different commercial
communities.
In this paper, we present one such commerce middleware component -- an
Auction Manager designed to simplify and automate both the creation of new
markets and the matching of users to existing markets.
The Auction Manager determines which markets are appropriate for a given
buyer or seller using market-specific inference rules applied to the
current market offerings.
We also show how these same inference rules can be used
by the Auction Manager to automatically compose and decompose market
offerings to respond to changing conditions within the marketplace.
Finally, we describe how the Auction Manager provides a focal point
for expressing policy decisions such as how much to charge for starting
and running auctions, as well as who and when to charge.
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