Customer Sharing in Economic Networks with Costs

Customer Sharing in Economic Networks with Costs

Bin Li, Dong Hao, Dengji Zhao, Tao Zhou

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 368-374. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/51

In an economic market, sellers, infomediaries and customers constitute an economic network. Each seller has her own customer group and the seller's private customers are unobservable to other sellers. Therefore, a seller can only sell commodities among her own customers unless other sellers or infomediaries share her sale information to their customer groups. However, a seller is not incentivized to share others' sale information by default, which leads to inefficient resource allocation and limited revenue for the sale. To tackle this problem, we develop a novel mechanism called customer sharing mechanism (CSM) which incentivizes all sellers to share each other's sale information to their private customer groups. Furthermore, CSM also incentivizes all customers to truthfully participate in the sale. In the end, CSM not only allocates the commodities efficiently but also optimizes the seller's revenue.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems