The Auction Manager can provide an auction recommendation service by using auction- and good-specific knowledge to pick reasonable auctions. Thus having the Auction Manager recommend auctions is not necessarily incompatible with having agents deciding which auctions they want to create. Agents can specify which service or auction attributes they care about and the Auction manager can fill in the rest.
Some of these defaults are independent of the particular context. For example, no one would want an auction for immediate query planning service to have a clearing time of once a day. Also, if a market is inactive for a certain amount of time it makes sense to have it deactivate itself, since it can always be restarted if necessary. However, choosing the appropriate auction(s) will generally be affected by user preferences, technology factors, and the market environment. If an agent is a monopolist then its definition of the best kind of auction will differ from one for a library agent who charges its marginal cost.
A key question is how much does the Auction Manager know about participating agents and what are the criteria that it uses to determine the best auctions. In the case of the outside vendors, we may be able to support their choice of auctions in two ways. The first is simply by using defaults to fill in partially specified auctions with reasonable values. The second is by using economic theory to set up auctions depending on what kind of agent requests it. For example, the Auction Manager can choose an auction which is incentive compatible for buyers or for sellers, but not both [24].
In the case of library agents, where the focus is more oriented towards designing simpler agents to allocate library services efficiently, the Auction Manager could have a library policy to determine which are the best auctions to create. Due to the complexity of the auction design space, a realistic library policy would have to be expressed in simple, qualitative terms such as more market efficiency is better, lower transaction costs are better, less price volatility is better, and so forth.