A buyer allocation support system in first-price auctions

As the Internet develops, it has become an increasingly prosperous network for many types of commerce. Internet auctions have been a particularly effective form of electronic commerce and is a promising field for applying agent technologies. In many existing auction sites, some sellers deal in the same sort goods or their imitations. Buyers bid for each item on sale. Buyers cannot always purchase goods at a lower price, because buyers compete but do not cooperate with each other. Thus, buyers need to search hard to find the goods they can purchase. In this paper, we propose a bidder support system to make collusion in auctions on the Internet. In our system, buyers can purchase goods at a lower price in collusion with each other. In our system, each buyer selects a good based on his/her multi-attribute preferences. Our system supports buyer´s decision making by using the analytic hierarchy process. Advantages of the bidder group support system are described as follows: each buyer can purchase a good at the lowest price, buyer´s multi-attribute utilities are reflected, the mechanism is robustness for buyer´s anticipation. We conducted an experiment to investigate and compare buyers´ utilities between existing auctions and our system. Our experiment shows that buyers utilities in our system are sufficiently higher than these in existing auctions.