Infrastructure costs include the computational and network costs of actually running the auction and--even more importantly--the resultant increase in lookup and indexing costs. Clearly these costs must accounted for through a policy which can set the appropriate fees. One simple policy is to have a uniform flat fees charged for infrastructure usage. For example, an auction might either charge a single fee to the auction owner/initiator to run it for a given time period, or charge smaller per-transaction fees to individual auction participants. On the other hand, a library policy might use system-level criteria to promote auctions which the library considers beneficial to the system as a whole, perhaps by charging less for them, or running them for free. A side benefit to having an explicitly stated policy, whether system-oriented or not, is that it could be used to provide guidance when choosing among a number of potential auction specifications for a given product.
Agent decision complexity costs result with the increase in market choices. If an agent can buy a service from several related markets, the agent might handle it in one of two basic ways. The first is to trade simultaneously in multiple markets, facing the risk of ending up with multiple outstanding commitments. The second is to trade in only one market at a time, facing problems of market liquidity where there may be two parties willing to trade, but unable to do so since they are at different markets. Of course, an agent may make sequential offers at different markets, but this results in trading delays and will not necessarily bring all parties together, due to timing difficulties.
The Auction Manager can provide a vehicle to experiment with alternative market-creation policies by evaluating the resultant market configurations.