Pricing agents for a group buying system

Internet group buying systems have been widely used recently. In those systems, because the reserve price is provided by the buyer, the success rate can be decreased if the reserve price is set too low compared with the normal price. Otherwise, an unsuitable successful bid can be made if the reserve price is set too high based on inaccurate information. Likewise, the seller's providing too high a bid price can deteriorate his/her own successful bid rate, whereas a successful bid with too low a price may make no profit in the sale. Therefore, pricing agents that recommend adequate prices based on the past buying and selling history data can be helpful. In this paper, we propose two kinds of agents. One suggests reserve prices to buyers based on the past buying history database of the system. The other recommends bid prices to a seller based on the past bidding history data of the company using the cost accounting theory. Through performance experiments, we show that the successful bid rate can increase by preventing buyers from making unreasonable reserve prices. Also, we show that, for the seller, the rate of successful bids with appropriate profits can increase. Using the pricing agents, we design and implement an XML-based group buying system. Because it is based on XML standards, it has advantages such as interoperability and extendibility compared with previous proprietary electronic commerce systems.