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A pricing method of online group-buying for continuous price function

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Abstract

Group-buying has become a popular commodity trading mode in current business modes. However, the existing unified price of group-buying often determines the price by setting the ladder function according to the final quantities. This method not only ignores the contributions of participants to group-buying, but also leads to the phenomenon of buyers’ false reports. In this paper, a pricing method of online group-buying based on continuous price function is proposed. We adopt an algorithm called Vickrey–Clarke–Groves for group-buying; buyers’ payments are the sum of commodities’ price and the extra amount by purchase quantity. The mechanism motivates buyers to report truthful preference through the compensatory payment. We prove that the mechanism has economic attributes such as incentive compatibility through theoretical proof and simulation experiments.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant 61872313, Grant 61170201, and Grant 61472344, the key research projects in education informatization in Jiangsu Province (20180012), in part by the Postgraduate Research and Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province under Grant KYCX18_2366 and in part by the Yangzhou Science and Technology under Grant YZ2017288 and YZ2018209 and Yangzhou University Jiangdu High-end Equipment Engineering Technology Research Institute Open Project under Grant YDJD201707.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, Jiangsu, China

    Junwu Zhu, Ling Teng & Zhengnan Zhu

  2. Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu-shi, Fukuoka, Japan

    Huimin Lu

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  1. Junwu Zhu
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  2. Ling Teng
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  3. Zhengnan Zhu
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Correspondence to Junwu Zhu.

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We declare that we have no financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that can inappropriately influence our work; there is no professional or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service and/or company that could be construed as influencing the position presented in, or the review of, the manuscript entitled, “A Pricing Method of Online Group-Buying for Continuous Price Function.”

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Zhu, J., Teng, L., Zhu, Z. et al. A pricing method of online group-buying for continuous price function. Neural Comput & Applic 32, 4453–4461 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-019-04017-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-019-04017-y

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