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Robit: an extensible auction-based market platform for challenged environments

Published: 13 December 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Open and competitive marketplaces, like those enabled by the internet, bring enormous value to consumers while fostering innovation and growth across a wide variety of businesses. Electronic commerce has forever changed how people trade goods and services. Last year alone, US consumers spent more than $150 billion dollars on internet sales [5]. However, developing countries largely have not benefited from these advances, often due to low network penetration, lack of locally relevant markets, and requirements for additional facilities (such as credit cards, shipping arrangements etc.) to take advantage of such marketplaces. Even when these markets are established with local content and poor connectivity in mind, they are often specific to a certain domain or community. This paper introduces Robit, an extensible auction-based market platform for use in challenged network environments. Robit enables developers to incorporate a market layer in their applications and open their service to a wider audience. Robit is built with challenged environments in mind, where communication channels are narrow and potentially expensive. The market structure in Robit is based on a survey of studies in auction theory and economics, and incorporates widely available communication tools. To demonstrate how Robit can be used to add a market layer to digital services, we have modified an open source data fetching application targeted towards challenged environments to use our platform. In addition, we analyze a standalone auction-based marketplace constructed using the Robit infrastructure. We also describe an in-country user study and a small pilot deployment for proof-of-concept.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Digital Trading and Market Platforms: Ghana Case StudyIntroduction to Development Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-86065-3_9(221-245)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2022
  • (2013)A mobile market for agricultural trade in UgandaProceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development10.1145/2537052.2537065(1-10)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2013
  • (2011)Analyzing and accelerating web access in a school in peri-urban IndiaProceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web10.1145/1963192.1963358(443-452)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2011

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICTD '10: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
December 2010
479 pages
ISBN:9781450307871
DOI:10.1145/2369220
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 December 2010

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View all
  • (2022)Digital Trading and Market Platforms: Ghana Case StudyIntroduction to Development Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-86065-3_9(221-245)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2022
  • (2013)A mobile market for agricultural trade in UgandaProceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computing for Development10.1145/2537052.2537065(1-10)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2013
  • (2011)Analyzing and accelerating web access in a school in peri-urban IndiaProceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web10.1145/1963192.1963358(443-452)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2011

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