ICEC 2011 Workshop on
Robustness and Reliability of
Electronic Marketplaces
Wednesday 3 August 2011, Liverpool, UK
"The 13th International Conference on Electronic Commerce
2-5th August 2011, Liverpool, UK
 

ICEC 2011 Workshop on Robustness and Reliability of Electronic Marketplaces

Wednesday 3 August 2011, Liverpool, UK

IMPORTANT: Workshop now an ICEC special track on Wednesday 3 August

List of accepted papers

Electronic marketplaces are ever more ubiquitous, and cover a wide range of application areas such as financial exchanges, online auctions and advertising, as well as electric power trading. With so much of the economy depending on these systems working properly, it is of paramount importance that they are robust and reliable. Robustness in this context means that the marketplaces are stable, and resilient to changes such as market shocks. Nothing exemplifies the importance of robustness more than the recent financial crisis, and the flash crash on the 6th of May 2010. Related to this, reliability refers to the ability of the system to function properly, and that there is little scope for manipulation. For example, in electric power trading, the market must ensure that demand is matched by supply to prevent blackouts occurring. In online advertising, markets need to work efficiently and compute results within seconds or less. In online auctions, bidders should be discouraged to snipe or to shade their bids.

 In order to obtain robust and reliable electronic marketplaces, it is important to design the right incentives, structures and rules, and to gain a fundamental understanding of such systems using modelling techniques. This is achieved through the use of theoretical tools, such as game theory, as well as empirical tools such as agent-based simulation. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds, including economics, mathematics, finance, operations research and computer science, and working on different application areas. In particular, topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to: