The Auction Manager is a market middleware component providing services to support automated negotiation in a large-scale electronic commerce systems. Specifically it supports this by generating and tracking auctions, matching agents to potential markets, and providing a means to notify agents when markets of interest to them are created. We have described how the Auction Manager can use market-specific knowledge to recommend auctions and how it can serve as a focal point for information collection and dissemination.
Future work involves using the Auction Manager to experiment with different auction creation policies and auction pricing policies and, based on the resultant market configurations and market data, evaluate their effectiveness in promoting specified system policies.