Computational issues in E-commerce trading exchanges

Abstract

The classical meaning of trading involves establishment of a pairwise matching, (i.e. formation of directed cycles of length two between buyers and sellers). In this paper, we look at computational issues that arise in trading by bartering. Bartering enables us to have richer trading patterns. In bartering, we can form arbitrary lengthdirected cycles/hypercycles among barterers of items and hence establish more complex trading arrangements. We review some earlier results and also present some new results on parallel generation of hypercycles in the single instance multi-item bartering problem. We report computational results obtained on our Linux cluster.