Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Example Application of the b-Core:
Buyer Coalition Problem with Beliefs
The buyer needs a hundred eyes; the
seller but one.
George Herbert
In this chapter, we will further demonstrate the usefulness of
the b-core by studying a real-life application of e-commerce
and distributed agent technology. The problem we are looking
at is called the online buyer coalition formation problem.
Currently, most of the existing works in this topic involve
some kind of social utility-based approaches. And most of
them assume the agents' utilities to be transferable. However,
as in any other coalition formation problems, we argue that
there are often situations where the transferable utility model
is not well suited, and from a game theoretical point of view,
coalition stability is arguably a more important solution con-
cept than social utility.
The reason that this application is a good example of how
the concept of b-core can be applied in real life is that, as in
most e-commerce applications, the notion of common knowl-
edge is simply non-existent. In fact, any stability analysis must
take into account the beliefs of the individual participants.
All these make the b-core a natural stability criterion for the
problem.
As in previous chapters, we will study the problem from a
Search WWH ::
Custom Search