Market matching

  In a large-scale and dynamic commerce environment, the Auction Manager's role of matching agents with the appropriate markets is nontrivial. If the exact market that the agent has requested exists, then all the Auction Manager has to do is return that market. However, given the wide variety of possible service and market descriptions, an exact match may not exist. Even if an exact match exists, the agent may wish to know about all markets in which it could trade--there may be tradeoffs between price and quality that only the agent can make. For example, suppose there are two query planning markets: one in High School Science, and one in High School Astronomy. If the High School Astronomy market is smaller and the quality higher (because it is more specialized), then the price may be higher. An agent wanting High School Astronomy query planning has to make a choice between the higher quality of the Astronomy market versus the lower price of the more general Science market.

Given that we can express these different goods and markets in some description language, how do we reason about them in a market context? In particular, what kinds of market-specific operators and inference rules are needed?