Abstract

Pricing goods properly is critical for the further growth of electronic commerce. One price discrimination technique drawn from microeconomics theory has shown promise as regards the trading of information services. This technique, however, has a serious drawback in that it assumes that a seller knows the distribution of buyers’ preferences. Unfortunately, obtaining such data is not always easy. We can incorporate agent technologies into the technique, namely, by gathering sales data and updating information about buyers, and thus improve the performance. However, such an adaptive method can end in failure if each agent becomes self-interested, namely, if the problem of collusion emerges. If collusion does occur, the rationality of any price revision is lost. To solve this problem, we have developed a pricing mechanism that can withstand buyer collusion. We provide a concrete method for calculating quality and price combinations, and then analyze the mechanism theoretically and show its effectiveness.