Abstract:

People who work in an office often have different pools of resources that they want to exchange. They want to trade their resources/work(seller) with a person who wants that particular resource(buyer) and in return get another resource the buyer offers. These kind of exchanges are often called Barter-exchange where an object is traded for another object without the use of money (Ex: uExhange, Craigslist). In this scenario there is a space of available objects and a space of desired objects. When an available object matches a desired object a trade can be made. Usually this type of trade is bi-directional. One trader has an item that a second trader wants and the second trader has the item that the first trader wants. This trade is a simple bi-lateral trade. Another kind is the multi-lateral trade in which multiple parties are involved, along with an intermediary trader to facilitate the original trade. In this project, I will be working to design an online bartering system with multi-lateral possibilities. Also I will be implementing a suggestion mechanism that will be using auctioning systems.

CS297 Results

• I understood how an English and Dutch auctioning system works.
• Studied how eBay uses auctioning in their site
• Implemented a prototype of a simple auctioning system where the user can list an item and buyers can bid for the item. The system picks the maximum bid for an object after the auction time is over.

Proposed Schedule

Key Deliverables:

• Software
  • Implement online bartering system
  • Implement a global quantity that can have many sub-objects of same quantity (Ex: A user can have 5 global quantity of teaching units that he can trade which is due from 5 different users.)
  • Improve the bartering system to support multi-lateral scenario
  • Use auctions and design a suggestion mechanism (Make the user set a lowest bid he is willing to accept and an auction end time. The system must automatically decrement the bid until a matching resource is found and suggest the user with that resource.)
• Report
  • CS 298 report
  • Project Code and test result documentation

Innovations and Challenges

• Implementing multi-lateral for bartering process.
• Designing the suggestion mechanism using auctioning system for bartering will be challenging

References:

[AuthorYear] Reference_work. Author_Names. Publisher. Year.

[1] An improved algorithm for multi-way trading for exchange and barter. Randy M.Kaplan 2011

[2] Auction Theory. Vijay Krishna. Academic Press . 2010.

[3] How Barter system works https://www.mint.com/barter-system-history-the-past-and-present

[4] Match-Making in Bartering Scenarios. Sebastein Mathieu