A Scalable Framework to Choose Sellers in E-Marketplaces Using POMDPs

Authors

  • Athirai Irissappane Nanyang Technological University
  • Frans A. Oliehoek University of Amsterdam and University of Liverpool
  • Jie Zhang Nanyang Technological University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v30i1.9995

Keywords:

Trust, E-Marketplace, POMDP

Abstract

In multiagent e-marketplaces, buying agents need to select good sellers by querying other buyers (called advisors). Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) have shown to be an effective framework for optimally selecting sellers by selectively querying advisors. However, current solution methods do not scale to hundreds or even tens of agents operating in the e-market. In this paper, we propose the Mixture of POMDP Experts (MOPE) technique, which exploits the inherent structure of trust-based domains, such as the seller selection problem in e-markets, by aggregating the solutions of smaller sub-POMDPs. We propose a number of variants of the MOPE approach that we analyze theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that MOPE can scale up to a hundred agents thereby leveraging the presence of more advisors to significantly improve buyer satisfaction.

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Published

2016-02-21

How to Cite

Irissappane, A., A. Oliehoek, F., & Zhang, J. (2016). A Scalable Framework to Choose Sellers in E-Marketplaces Using POMDPs. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v30i1.9995