A New Matching Approach based on Benefit of Broker, Buyer and Seller in E-commerce

Abstract

A broker in e-commerce can provide many value-adding functions that cannot be replaced by direct buyer-seller dealings. A broker acts as a middle-man between buyers and sellers in the trading process to achieve its utility as well as to satisfy buyer and seller’s requirements. Therefore, a challenge of a broker's responsibility in e-commerce is how to maximize a broker, buyer and seller's utility. To solve the challenge, an agent-based broker modeling approach is proposed in this paper. The major contributions of this paper are that (i) a proposed framework is applicable to help a broker to carry out matching processes; (ii) a formula system is generated to calculate buyer and seller's utility for multi-attribute trading; and (iii) a multi-objective model is built to help a broker to consider the combination of broker, buyer and seller's maximal utility. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach.