Law-governed peer-to-peer auctions
07 May 2002-pp 109-116
TL;DR: A flexible architecture for the creation of Internet auctions is proposed, which allows the custom definition of the auction parameters, and provides a decentralized control of the Auction process.
Abstract: This paper proposes a flexible architecture for the creation of Internet auctions. It allows the custom definition of the auction parameters, and provides a decentralized control of the auction process. Auction policies are defined as laws in the Law Governed Interaction (LGI) paradigm. Each of these laws specifies not only the auction algorithm itself (e.g. open-cry, dutch, etc.) but also how to handle the other parameters usually involved in the online auctions, such as certification, auditioning, and treatment of complaints. LGI is used to enforce the rules established in the auction policy within the agents involved in the process. After the agents find out about the actions, they interact in a peer-to-peer communication protocol, reducing the role of the centralized auction room to an advertising registry, and taking profit of the distributed nature of the Internet to conduct the auction. The paper presents an example of an auction law, illustrating the use of the proposed architecture.
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01 Apr 1997
TL;DR: The objective of this paper is to give a comprehensive introduction to applied cryptography with an engineer or computer scientist in mind on the knowledge needed to create practical systems which supports integrity, confidentiality, or authenticity.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to give a comprehensive introduction to applied cryptography with an engineer or computer scientist in mind. The emphasis is on the knowledge needed to create practical systems which supports integrity, confidentiality, or authenticity. Topics covered includes an introduction to the concepts in cryptography, attacks against cryptographic systems, key use and handling, random bit generation, encryption modes, and message authentication codes. Recommendations on algorithms and further reading is given in the end of the paper. This paper should make the reader able to build, understand and evaluate system descriptions and designs based on the cryptographic components described in the paper.
2,188 citations
01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: This chapter proposes an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit, and presents a taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way.
Abstract: If agents are to negotiate automatically with one another they must share a negotiation mechanism, specifying what possible actions each party can take at any given time, when negotiation terminates, and what is the structure of the resulting agreements. Current standardization activities such as FIPA [2] and WS-Agreement [3] represent this as a negotiation protocol specifying the flow of messages. However, they omit other aspects of the rules of negotiation (such as obliging a participant to improve on a previous offer), requiring these to be represented implicitly in an agent’s design, potentially resulting incompatibility, maintenance and re-usability problems. In this chapter, we propose an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit. We present (i) a taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way; (ii) a simple interaction protocol, which is able to support any mechanism which can be captured using the declarative rules; (iii) a software framework for negotiation that allows agents to effectively participate in negotiations defined using our rule taxonomy and protocol and (iv) a language for expressing aspects of the negotiation based on OWL-Lite [4]. We provide examples of some of the mechanisms that the framework can support.
130 citations
Cites background from "Law-governed peer-to-peer auctions"
...Its true that LGI has been applied to peer-to-peer auctions [26], but the focus of that work was mainly on the peer-to-peer aspect, aiming to dispense with a centralized service for auctions....
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15 Jul 2002
TL;DR: This paper presents an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit, and presents a taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way.
Abstract: If agents are to negotiate automatically with one another they must share a negotiation mechanism, specifying what possible actions each party can take at any given time, when negotiation terminates, and what the resulting agreements will be. The current state-of-the-art represents this as a negotiation protocol specifying the flow of messages. However, they omit other aspects of the rules of negotiation (such as obliging a participant to improve on a previous offer), requiring these to be represented implicitly in an agent's design, potentially resulting in compatibility, maintenance and re-usability problems. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit. We present (i) A taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way. (ii) A simple interaction protocol, which is able to support any mechanism which can be captured using the declarative rules. (iii) A software framework for negotiation, implemented in JADE [3] that allows agents to effectively participate in negotiations defined using our rule taxonomy and protocol.
81 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that while last-minute bidding (sniping) is an effective strategy against bidders engaging in incremental bidding (and against those with common values), in general, delaying bidding is disadvantageous even if delayed bids are sure to be received before the auction closes.
Abstract: We present a mathematical model of the eBay auction protocol and perform a detailed analysis of the effects that the eBay proxy bidding system and the minimum bid increment have on the auction properties. We first consider the revenue of the auction, and we show analytically that when two bidders with independent private valuations use the eBay proxy bidding system there exists an optimal value for the minimum bid increment at which the auctioneer's revenue is maximized. We then consider the sequential way in which bids are placed within the auction, and we show analytically that independent of assumptions regarding the bidders' valuation distribution or bidding strategy the number of visible bids placed is related to the logarithm of the number of potential bidders. Thus, in many cases, it is only a minority of the potential bidders that are able to submit bids and are visible in the auction bid history (despite the fact that the other hidden bidders are still effectively competing for the item). Furthermore, we show through simulation that the minimum bid increment also introduces an inefficiency to the auction, whereby a bidder who enters the auction late may find that its valuation is insufficient to allow them to advance the current bid by the minimum bid increment despite them actually having the highest valuation for the item. Finally, we use these results to consider appropriate strategies for bidders within real world eBay auctions. We show that while last-minute bidding (sniping) is an effective strategy against bidders engaging in incremental bidding (and against those with common values), in general, delaying bidding is disadvantageous even if delayed bids are sure to be received before the auction closes. Thus, when several bidders submit last-minute bids, we show that rather than seeking to bid as late as possible, a bidder should try to be the first sniper to bid (i.e., it should “snipe before the snipers”).
60 citations
Cites background from "Law-governed peer-to-peer auctions"
...RELATED WORK The growth of Web-based electronic commerce has initiated much research into the design of novel mechanisms for online auctions [Fontoura et al. 2002], and also effective bidding strategies for automated bidding agents [Guo 2002; Dumas et al. 2002; Anthony and Jennings 2003]....
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...The growth of Web-based electronic commerce has initiated much research into the design of novel mechanisms for online auctions [Fontoura et al. 2002], and also effective bidding strategies for automated bidding agents [Guo 2002; Dumas et al....
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TL;DR: This paper presents a lightweight and Cooperative multifactOr considered file Replication Protocol (CORP), which dramatically reduces the overhead of both file replication and consistency maintenance.
Abstract: File replication is widely used in structured P2P systems to avoid hot spots in servers and enhance file availability. The number of replicas and replication distance affect the file replication cost. These two elements and the replica update frequency determined in the file replication stage also affect the cost of subsequent consistency maintenance. However, most existing file replication protocols focus on improving file lookup efficiency without considering its cost and its subsequent influence on consistency maintenance. This paper studies the problem about how a server chooses files to replicate and where to replicate files to achieve low cost in both file replication and consistency maintenance stages without compromising the effectiveness of file replication. This paper presents a lightweight and Cooperative multifactOr considered file Replication Protocol (CORP) to achieve this goal. CORP simultaneously takes into account multiple factors including file popularity, update rate, node available capacity, file load, and node locality, aiming to minimize the number of replicas, update frequency, and replication distance. CORP also dynamically adjusts the number of replicas based on ever-changing file popularity and visit pattern. Extensive experimental results from simulation and PlanetLab real-world testbed demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of CORP in comparison with other file replication protocols. It dramatically reduces the overhead of both file replication and consistency maintenance. In addition, it exhibits high adaptiveness to skewed lookups and yields significant improvement in reducing overloaded nodes. Specifically, compared to the other replication protocols, CORP can reduce more than 71 percent of file replicas, 84 percent of overloaded nodes, 94 percent of consistency maintenance cost, and 72 percent of file replication and consistency maintenance latency.
21 citations
Cites background from "Law-governed peer-to-peer auctions"
...In addition, future P2P applications also need consistency support to deliver frequently updated contents such as directory service [27], online auction [28], remote collaboration [29], shared calendar [30], [31], P2P web cache [32], and online games [33]....
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References
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TL;DR: It is shown that LGI is at least as general as a conventional centralized coordination mechanism (CCM), and that it is more scalable, and generally more efficient, then CCM.
Abstract: Software technology is undergoing a transition form monolithic systems, constructed according to a single overall design, into conglomerates of semiautonomous, heterogeneous, and independently designed subsystems, constructed and managed by different organizations, with little, if any, knowledge of each other. Among the problems inherent in such conglomerates, none is more serious than the difficulty to control the activities of the disparate agents operating in it, and the difficulty for such agents to coordinate their activities with each other. We argue that the nature of coordination and control required for such systems calls for the following principles to be satisfied: (1) coordination policies need to be enforced: (2) the enforcement needs to be decentralized; and (3) coordination policies need to be formulated explicitly—rather than being implicit in the code of the agents involved—and they should be enforced by means of a generic, broad spectrum mechanism; and (4) it should be possible to deploy and enforce a policy incrementally, without exacting any cost from agents and activities not subject to it. We describe a mechansim called law-governed interaction (LGI), currently implemented by the Moses toolkit, which has been designed to satisfy these principles. We show that LGI is at least as general as a conventional centralized coordination mechanism (CCM), and that it is more scalable, and generally more efficient, then CCM.
357 citations
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IBM1
TL;DR: How the delay, security, and easy collaboration aspects of the Internet will cause auctions on the Internet to be different than the traditional auctions is discussed.
Abstract: We describe an application for auctioning goods on the Internet. A variety of commonly used auction mechanisms that are supported by the application, security requirements, and pre-auction and post-auction interactions needed to complete auction based trading are discussed. Then we present a software architecture and describe the various processes that comprise the auction application. Finally, we discuss how the delay, security, and easy collaboration aspects of the Internet will cause auctions on the Internet to be different than the traditional auctions.
177 citations
TL;DR: It is necessary to analyze the impact of electronic market implementation on search, price discovery, and trade settlement in order to understand the impactof the electronic marketplace on firms and markets.
Abstract: Electronic markets have become increasingly popular alternatives to traditional market forms over the last few years. This article explains how electronic markets can be used either to create new markets or to strengthen existing markets, and provides examples of the impact alternative electronic market applications can have on firm competitiveness and market structures. The central claim of this article is that it is necessary to analyze the impact of electronic market implementation on search, price discovery, and trade settlement in order to understand the impact of the electronic marketplace on firms and markets. Two forms of electronic marketplaces-electronic brokerage and electronic auction--are examined from the perspective of fundamental economic factors that influence total transactions costs and the efficiency of alternative market structures. Social and organizational barriers to successful adoption of electronic markets are also discussed.
136 citations
TL;DR: Under this architecture a protocol can be established simply by writing it into the law of a system, without having to worry about the programs that drive the various objects that might populate that system.
Abstract: In order to facilitate enforcement of protocols, an architecture for distributed systems is introduced under which all interactions between objects are governed by an explicit and strictly enforced set of rules, called the law of the system. This law is global in the sense that all the objects of the system are made to obey it, but the maintenance of the law and its enforcement are performed locally, at each object (or node). The term law is used to emphasized that it not only provides the specification of protocols, but actually governs the system by enforcing them. In other words, under this architecture a protocol can be established simply by writing it into the law of a system, without having to worry about the programs that drive the various objects that might populate that system. The law, then, is the enforced specification of protocols. It is shown that various familiar protocols can be established under this architecture. A technique for online distributed updating of the global law of a system is presented. >
98 citations
11 Sep 2000
TL;DR: An extension to LGI is presented allowing it to support implicit groups, also called communities, which require no centralcon trol of any kind, and whose membership does not have to be regulated, and might not be completely known to anybody.
Abstract: We consider the problem of coordination and control of large heterogeneous groups of agents distributed over the Internet in the context of Law-Governed Interaction (LGI) [2][5]. LGI is a mode of interaction that allows a group of distributed heterogeneous agents to interact with each other with confidence that an explicitly specified policy, called the law of the group, is complied with by everyone in the group.
The originalLGI model5. supported only explicit groups, whose membership is maintained and controlled by a central server. Such a central server is necessary for applications that require each member of the group to know about the membership of the entire group. However, in the case where members do not need to know the membership of the entire group, such a central server can become an unnecessary performance bottleneck, as group size increases, as well as a single point of failure.
In this paper, we present an extension to LGI allowing it to support implicit groups, also called communities, which require no centralcon trol of any kind, and whose membership does not have to be regulated, and might not be completely known to anybody.
22 citations