GEM: A global electronic market system

摘要

The emergence and growing popularity of electronic commerce in general and Internet auctions in particular, has raised the challenge to explore scalable global electronic markets, involving both human and automated traders. While centralized auctions are believed to provide better economic results in conventional markets, a single auction server over the public Internet is not scalable and not reliable, due to the potential for very high load and because of the unpredictable and generally low network bandwidth, and it may not be feasible due to local autonomy constraints, which demand some degree of control over local trading policies. GEM is a Java based generic framework for decentralized Internet-based markets. It strives to balance the single-market abstraction, which is important for economic efficiency, with a geographically distributed physical market, which is essential for system efficiency, scalability and autonomy. This is done through the introduction of wide-area-oriented yet consistent distributed trading methods, and a scalable distributed architecture. The second main contribution of GEM is in the design of an individual (local) auction market. GEM provides a flexible architecture that delineates the abstract components of a generic market and specifies control and dataflow constraints between them, but allows variations in the concrete implementation of components with minimal or no impact on the implementation of other components. In addition, GEM provides dynamic (re)configuration and pluggability of policy components at runtime, which enables to adapt market policies to variations in trading patterns or system behavior, adding another level of flexibility to market designers and administrators.