An Economic Model-Based Matching Approach Between Buyers and Sellers Through a Broker in an Open E-Marketplace

A broker in an open e-marketplace enables buyers and sellers to do business with each other. Although a broker plays an important role in e-marketplaces, theory and guidelines for matching between buyers and sellers in multi-attribute exchanges are limited. Therefore, a challenge for a broker’s responsibility is how to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree as its goals under the consideration of trade-off between a buyer’s buying quantity and price paid to a seller, and other attributes. To solve this challenge, this paper proposes an economic model-based matching approach between a buyer’s requirements and a seller’s offers. The major contributions of this paper are that (i) a broker can model a seller’s price policy as per a buyer’s buying quantity through communication between a broker and a seller; (ii) due to each buyer’s different quantity demand, a broker models a buyer’s satisfaction degree as per a buyer’s buying quantity based on communication between a broker and a buyer; and (iii) to carry out a broker’s matching processes, an objective function and a set of constraints are generated to help a broker to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach.