Abstract Peter Gomber a Auctions in Electronic Commerce- Efficiency versus Computational Tr.pdf

Auctions in Electronic Commerce - Efficiency versus Computational Tractability - 1 Peter Gombera Claudia Schmidta Christof Weinhardta aUniversity of Giessen “Business Informatics“ Licher Strasse 70, D-35394 Giessen, Germany phone: (+49) 0641/99-22610, fax: (+49) 0641/99-22619 {peter.gomber, claudia.schmidt, christof.weinhardt}@wirtschaft.uni-giessen.de 1 This work is part of the project ‘Decentralized Planning in Business’ that is supported by DFG under contract We 1436/3-1. Abstract In Electronic Commerce, the intra-organizational co- ordination of directly responsible units, e. g. profit- centers or firms within an affiliated group, is of increasing importance. These organizational units can be modeled within a Multi-Agent System (MAS), an interconnection of autonomous information systems. This paper investigates co-ordination mechanisms for MAS in decentralized transportation planning that ensure efficient allocation of scarce resources on the basis of local planning processes. In the domain of transportation, planning problems are characterized by large amounts of data, limitations of time for planning and the intractability of computational problems. Auctions as market-like co-ordination mechanisms are discussed with respect to the trade-off between theoretical evidence on the quality of the allocation and computational tractability. Keywords: Auctions; Transportation Planning; Computational Tractability Introduction Increasing (inter)national competition and deregulation lead to co-operation among transportation agencies on various organizational and institutional levels, e. g. strategic alliances, mergers and affiliated groups. Moreover, forwarding agencies tend to divisional structures and profit- center organizations. Consequently, in the domain of transportation planning the problem arises of how to allocate jobs to different organizational units within an association. In particular, co-opera