Web Services for Negotiation and Bargaining in Electronic Markets: Design Requirements and Implementation Framework

Information systems researchers continue to develop Web services hoping that, in a near future, these services will be offered in the e-marketplace. Perhaps the most foreseeable mechanism to enable the web services market is the use of WSDL, SOAP, XML, UDDI and the like that allow posting of existing services. Posting services does not, however, necessarily lead to market transactions. In this paper, we propose a set of web services that provide negotiation and bargaining support to facilitate the matching of supply and demand of web services. As a market broker, these web services would help (a) discover the supply/demand of web services; (b) find the most appropriate available service for a given request; (c) request services be modified if needed to satisfy user’s needs; (d) arbitrate the pricing mechanism with the recourse to bargaining whenever necessary; and (e) generate a contract.