Range Similarity and Satisfaction Measures for Buyers and Sellers in E-marketplaces

Price is the omnipresent factor in decision making of buyers and sellers when trading products in real and virtual marketplaces. However, since a fixed price can easily lead to unsuccessful negotiations, market players in practice often have price ranges in mind, which reflect possible negotiation concessions when finding potential buyer-seller matches. In this paper, we propose a price-range similarity measure that computes price-range overlaps based on buyers' maximum and sellers' minimum prices. We also propose two measures for computing a notion of satisfaction for buyers and sellers that is additionally based on their published prices. Our price-range similarity measure and the measures for satisfaction provide ranked seller/buyer lists for buyers, sellers, and the match-maker in an e-marketplace. These measures extend our earlier similarity algorithm towards a priced product/service compatibility measure for match-making between buyers and sellers.