@InProceedings{yamamoto01a,
  author =	 {Junichi Yamamoto and Katia Sycara},
  title =	 {A stable and efficient buyer coalition formation
                  scheme for e-marketplaces},
  booktitle =	 {Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on
                  Autonomous Agents},
  year =	 {2001},
  pages =	 {576--583},
  address =	 {Montreal, Canada},
  publisher =	 {{ACM} Press},
  abstract =	 {Buyer coalitions are beneficial in e-marketplaces
                  because they allow buyers to take advantage of
                  volume discounts. However, existing buyer coalition
                  formation schemes do not provide buyers with any
                  means to declare and match their preferences or to
                  calculate the division of the surplus in a stable
                  manner. Concepts and algorithms for coalition
                  formation have been investigated in game theory and
                  multi-agent systems research, but because of the
                  computational complexity, they cannot deal with
                  thousands of buyers which could join a coalition in
                  practice. In this paper, we propose a new buyer
                  coalition formation scheme GroupBuyAuction. At
                  GroupBuyAuction, buyers form a group based on a
                  category of items. A buyer can post an OR-asking for
                  multiple items within a category. An OR-asking is a
                  list of items indicating that the buyer would buy
                  any one of the items in the list with some
                  particular reservation price. Sellers bid volume
                  discount prices. The group leader agent splits the
                  group into sub groups (coalitions), selects a
                  winning seller for each coalition, and calculates
                  surplus division among buyers. We prove that this
                  scheme guarantees the stability in surplus division
                  within each coalition in terms of the core in game
                  theory. Simulation results show that, under most
                  conditions, our scheme increases buyers' utility,
                  and allows more buyers to obtain items compared to
                  traditional group buying schemes, such as those used
                  at existing commercial WWW sites.},
  url = 	 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/yamamoto01a.pdf},
  doi = 	 {10.1145/375735.376452},
  cluster = 	 {476903579489648293}
}