@InProceedings{sandholm06a,
  author =	 {Tuomas Sandholm},
  title =	 {Expressive Commerce and Its Application to Sourcing},
  booktitle =	 {Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on
                  Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence},
  year =	 2006,
  abstract =	 {Sourcing professionals buy several trillion dollars
                  worth of goods and services yearly. We introduced a
                  new paradigm called expressive commerce and applied
                  it to sourcing. It combines the advantages of highly
                  expressive human negotiation with the advantages of
                  electronic reverse auctions. The idea is that supply
                  and demand are expressed in drastically greater
                  detail than in traditional electronic auctions, and
                  are algorithmically cleared. This creates a Pareto
                  efficiency improvement in the allocation (a win-win
                  between the buyer and the sellers) but the market
                  clearing problem is a highly complex combinatorial
                  optimization problem. We developed the world's
                  fastest tree search algorithms for solving it. We
                  have hosted \$19 billion of sourcing using the
                  technology, and created \$2.1 billion of hard-dollar
                  savings. The suppliers also benefited by being able
                  to express production efficiencies and creativity,
                  and through exposure problem removal. Supply
                  networks were redesigned, with quantitative
                  understanding of the tradeoffs, and implemented in
                  weeks instead of months.},
  keywords = 	 {auctions},
  url = 	 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/sandholm06a.pdf}
}