- From: Miles Sabin <miles@milessabin.com>
- Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 16:24:53 +0000
- To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
bhaugen wrote,
> Ok, clearly auctions involve multiple parties.
> In pairwise interactions:
> Offerer interacts with Auctioneer.
> Bidders interact with Auctioneer.
> All Bidders can see bids posted by Auctioneer,
> but do not interact with each other.
> At the end, winning Bidder interacts with Offerer.
> ("Offerer" could also be "Auctioneer".)
>
> Correct?
For some kinds of auction, certainly ... but not for "open cry" auctions
(eg. English auctions): in that kind of scenario each bidder sees the
other bids simultaneously to the auctioneer. One way of simulating this
with pairwise interactions would be to have the auctioneer relay each
bid to all the other bidders. But as Geoff pointed out this is
inefficient wrt multicast, and requires the bidders to trust the
auctioneer.
In game-theoretic terms, the transformation to pairwise interaction
changes the landscape significantly ... it gives the auctioneer a lot
more power than she would have had otherwise.
It's a really nice clear example ... I wish I'd thought of it.
Cheers,
Miles
Received on Monday, 23 December 2002 11:25:26 UTC