Daniel Rolli

An Auction Reference Model for Describing and Running Auctions

With electronic auctions gaining importance, economists have increasingly gotten interested in researching the impact of variations in auction protocols. However, the infinite number of possible auction configurations and the significance of details make this a hard and tedious task. Therefore we address the issue of comprehensive description both from a conceptual and an implementation perspective. Central components that we identify serve as building blocks for an Auction Reference Model. We show how the components of the Auction Reference Model can be described in order to achieve an overall auction specification and how the descriptions are operationalized by a generic auction runtime engine1.

An asynchronous and secure ascending peer-to-peer auction

In recent years, auctions have become a very popular price discovery mechanism. Among them, second-price auctions are of theoretical importance, as they have the simple dominant strategy of bidding ones true valuation. Sellers, however, are reluctant to do so, as a malicious auctioneer could take advantage of this knowledge. Several distributed auction mechanisms have been suggested that make it possible to determine the auction outcome without revealing the winners valuation of the good; however, they are only suitable for sealed-bid auction.This paper suggests a distributed mechanism for ascending second price auctions. The auction protocol has the ability to preserve the privacy of the winning bidders true valuation or highest bid, respectively, with a high probability. The auction protocol is based on a high number of auctioneers that are distributed to several groups. A bidder generates an encrypted chain of monotonously increasing bidding steps, where each bidding step can be decrypted by a different auctioneer group reducing the possibilities of manipulation for malicious auctioneers. Another fundamental advantage of this secure approach is that bidders need not be online except for submitting their bid chain to the auctioneers.

30. A Peer-to-Peer Framework for Electronic Markets

Markets – in their ideal form – naturally represent Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems: market participants can be both client and server when exchanging offers, general messages, or goods. They can directly address each other, and interact in a decentralized and autonomous fashion. Most market implementations in history, however, were far from this ideal form.

A Minimal Market Model in ephemeral markets

Peer-to-peer markets going mobile spur spontaneity in trading considerably. Spontaneity, however, imposes severe informational requirements on the market participants. Informational requirements are twofold: Firstly, participants have to agree on a common vocabulary for that spontaneous market. Secondly, they need precise information about how the trading process is organized. Due to the lack of a central market operator these common understandings must be determined by the market participants themselves. Prior to any market process, these terms and regulations must be distributed by the market participant that initiates the market process. This raises the question concerning the used ontology. Standards describing (business) processes are available in general, but are currently not suitable for ephemeral markets. Electronic markets are extremely context sensitive, making the establishment of common understandings crucial as well as difficult. This paper uses structural similarities of markets and creates a Minimal Market Model. Since this model is for all conceivable markets constituent, it can be used as the core component. As any market is founded on this minimal model, it can be systematically extended to capture the peculiarities of each particular market. The derivation of the Minimal Market Model is founded on a solid ground of economic theory and refined such that it can be expressed in a formal way.

Distributed ascending proxy auction — A cryptographic approach

In recent years, auctions have become a very popular price discovery mechanism in the Internet. The common auction formats are typically centralized in nature. The peer-to-peer paradigm demands gearing up auctions for decentralized infrastructures. In this context, this paper proposes a distributed mechanism for ascending second-price auctions that relies on standard cryptographic algorithms. In essence, the auction protocol has the capability of preserving the privacy of the winning bidder’s true valuation.The auction protocol makes use of a high number of auctioneers divided into several groups. A bidder creates an encrypted chain of monotonously increasing bidding steps, where each bidding step can be decrypted by a different auctioneer group. This considerably reduces the attack and manipulation possibilities of malicious auctioneers. In addition, this secure approach does not require bidders to be online unless they are submitting their bid chain to the auctioneers.

Integrated Modeling of Technical and Business Aspects in Service Networks

The current trend towards a global services economy provides significant opportunities and challenges. For establishing complex services and delivering competitive advantages, several service providers have to work together. This collaboration creates a service network as an organizational form to be managed by a so-called service integrator. Within a service network, multiple dependencies between the resulting service and the contributions of the various service providers exist, on both technical and business aspects. In addition to the functional aspects, the non-functional service properties and respective service levels are of great importance. Successful joint management of the technical and business dependencies is a key prerequisite for the successful management of service networks.

Service Level Management for Service Value Networks

The ongoing trend towards a global services economy creates considerable market opportunities for various stakeholders. A service intermediary who offers complex services to customers and consumes services from suppliers and thus creates a service value network, faces the challenge of adhering to agreed service levels while minimizing associated costs, risks and potential penalties. Starting from a lifecycle model for service value networks, this paper identifies the service level management tasks to be performed by a service intermediary. For each of these tasks, supporting software tools have been developed. Together, they form an integrated tool chain which provides effective support for service level management of service intermediaries. The tools have been evaluated in case studies and industrial settings. The paper contributes the first study of an end-to-end service level management for service value networks.

Eine sichere verteilte Marktplattform für zukunftsfähige Energiesysteme (A Distributed and Secure Market Plattform for Future Energy Systems)

Zusammenfassung Die natürlichen Ressourcen der Erde verknappen sich angesichts des Wachstums der Weltwirtschaft drastisch. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt gerade die Gestaltung zukunftsfähiger Energiesysteme eine besondere Herausforderung dar. Im Projekt SESAM wird unter der Prämisse, dass ein internetbasierter Markt, der einem offenen, liberalisierten Modell folgt, letztlich auch der beste Garant für einen ressourcenschonenden Energieeinsatz ist, die Vision eines zukunftsfähigen Energiesystems entworfen. In dem vorliegenden Artikel werden zunächst die Rahmenbedingungen dieses Marktes vorgestellt und daran anschließend wird die ökonomische sowie rechtliche Ausgestaltung des Marktes präsentiert. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Beschreibung der notwendigen Informations- und Kommunikationsinfrastruktur. Summary Due to the increasing growth of the global economy, the world´s natural resources become depleted. Behind this background, especially the design of sustainable energy systems turns out to be a true challenge. In SESAM — Self Organisation and Spontaneity in Liberalised and Harmonised Markets — we consider that a Internet-based market following an open liberalised model is most likely to provide for a resource conserving energy use. In this article the framework of this market, that is our vision of a sustainable energy system is introduced. Besides, the economic as well as jurisprudential design of the market is presented. Finally a description of the necessary information and communication infrastructure is given.

Market agents with a sense for mechanisms

When software agents act on markets they typically face a predetermined market mechanism. Their strategies are a priori tailored by the agent designer to suit the market mechanism at stake. So, the market mechanisms are only considered and examined at design time. In this paper, we present an approach to how agents themselves can grasp market mechanisms at runtime, directly derive a valid interaction protocol and consider the mechanism structure for their strategies - even for mechanisms they have not known before. For exemplifying our ideas, we present a BPEL implementation of a reverse English auction that is based on the notion of an auction reference model and make the BPEL description available to the agent. We show how the agent will derive an interaction protocol - the valid behavior - and how it even forms a reasonable strategy when presuming some generic market knowledge and basic strategy building blocks