In the context of business to business (B2B) commerce, bilateral trading on products or services would involve multiple attributes.
The negotiating agents in the marketplace have conflicting interests and always act selfishly to maximize their own gains. An arbiter agent by knowing the interest of these agents could resolve the conflicts between them. That is the arbiter agent could ensure fairness among these agents by recommending bids that would make none worse off than the other. This objective of the arbiter agent, is modelled as a max-min optimization problem and we prove that this problem is NP-hard.
We propose a heuristic based on simulated annealing to solve this optimization problem and validate our claims that this heuristic behaves well in practice by an elaborate set of simulations.
By: K. Balaji and Varun Malhotra
Published in: RI02021 in 2002
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