Negotiation policies and coalition tools in e-marketplace environment

Abstract

The e-marketplace in Business To Business applications allows enterprises to make economic transactions in a virtual marketplace. Often Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) do not participate to this potential opportunity because of some distrust as: the benefits of e-marketplace participation are not perceived clearly; SMEs doubt that e-marketplace fits the products offered. The possibility to evaluate the real value added by an e-marketplace can be a driving force to adopting e-marketplace for SMEs. The research proposes negotiation policies, customer’s tactics and coalition tools as a value added services in e-marketplaces. The e-marketplace scenario is a private neutral linear owned by a third part with catalogue based procurement actions. A Multi Agent System methodology is used to implement the architecture of the e-marketplace. Furthermore, the author proposes the use of discrete-event simulation to test the suggested methodologies and to evaluate the economic value of adopting the proposed negotiation and coalition tools in e-marketplaces. The simulations are conducted in a very dynamic environment and a proper statistical analysis is performed. The simulation results show that the proposed methodologies lead to benefits both for suppliers and customers.