Towards a Customizable Platform for Simulation of Group Buying Markets

In commercial environments consumers with limited order size can aggregate their demand through a group buying process allowing them to form economies of scale. Currently researchers in the field of group buying have to develop specialized software themselves or customize a general purpose agent-based simulation platform. Both of these methods are time consuming and require the researcher to construct the necessary software infrastructure needed for group buying simulations before being able to conduct their experiments. In this paper we introduce a novel agent-based simulation platform, called GBSim, which has been customized for group buying environments.