Auctions in electronic commerce - Efficiency versus computational tractability

In Electronic Commerce, the intra-organizational coordinationof directly responsible units, e. g. profitcentersor firms within an affiliated group, is of increasingimportance. These organizational units can be modeledwithin a Multi-Agent System (MAS), an interconnectionof autonomous information systems. This paperinvestigates co-ordination mechanisms for MAS indecentralized transportation planning that ensureefficient allocation of scarce resources on the basis oflocal planning processes. In the domain oftransportation, planning problems are characterized bylarge amounts of data, limitations of time for planningand the intractability of computational problems.Auctions as market-like co-ordination mechanisms arediscussed with respect to the trade-off between theoreticalevidence on the quality of the allocation andcomputational tractability.