EXTENDED CORE MODEL FOR E-MARKETS.

Trading in an e-marketplace has become an essential aspect of the daily lives of many people. Coalitions, which allow traders to form teams, can sometimes accomplish things more efficiently than individuals. As group trading has become increasingly popular in the e-market, concepts and algorithms for coalition formation have drawn much attention from researchers in Multi-Agent Systems. However, most of the coalition schemes fail to check the stability of coalitions, or reduce the computational complexity of forming stable coalitions. The core has become a popular solution concept in economic applications for researchers in Computer Science, because it provides a way to find stable sets. However certain problems of the core hinder researchers from applying it to a real world market. For instance, the core is difficult to use in a large coalition because of its high computational complexity. Developing effective business models for emarket can be a real challenge, because incentive compatibility, distributed computing, and less computational complexity have to be considered at the same time. Numerous specialists are still endeavouring to do it. This paper proposes a new extended core model, which involves bundle selling of composite services, offering amount discount in group buying in the e-marketplace. Several service providers are involved in the transactions of bundle selling, while, on the other hand, many buyers form coalitions for the amount discount in the model. Unlike the traditional core, cores are combined together into a big core in the extended core model. An illustration of how the works is presented in the scenario of a travel agent. The outcome of the scenario is evaluated with Pareto efficiency, and that shows the high potential of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]