A Componentized Architecture for Dynamic Electronic Markets.

The emergence and growing popularity of Internet-based electronic market-places, in their various forms, has raised the challenge to explore genericity in market design. In this paper we present a domain-specific software architecture that delineates the abstract components of a generic market and specifies control and data-flow constraints between them, and a framework that allows convenient pluggability of components that implement specific market policies. The framework was realized in the GEM system. GEM provides infrastructure services that allow market designers to focus solely on market-issues. In addition, it allows dynamic (re)configuration of components. This functionality can be used to change market-policies as the environment or market trends change, adding another level of flexibility to market designers and administrators.