Designing Auctions for Coordination in Service Networks

Abstract

The evolving service ecologies show new ways of value co-creation through combinations of multiple service components which are described in service offerings. An open issue in such a large service ecology is how to efficiently coordinate and price service offerings. Service offerings provide different functionality and quality. Customers need to distinguish their preferences on different combinations of service attributes. In this chapter we address this issue of service offerings allocation and introduce a structure design approach, Market Engineering, as an appropriate method to design such mechanism. In order to apply this approach to service systems we introduce a formal model and a definition of service value networks. Examples exemplify our approach and we show one possible step towards implementing such a mechanism.