Author:
John Cartlidge
Affiliation:
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Software Agents, Multi-agent Simulation, Auctions, Financial Markets, Cloud Computing, CReST.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Auctions and Markets
;
Cloud Computing
;
Data Engineering
;
Databases and Data Security
;
Economic Agent Models
Abstract:
In September 2012, Amazon, the leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, launched a secondary
marketplace venue for users to buy and sell cloud resources between themselves—the Amazon EC2 Reserved
Instance Marketplace (ARIM). ARIM is designed to encourage users to purchase more long-term reserved
instances, thus generating more stable demand for the provider and additional revenue through commission on
sales. In this paper, we model ARIM using a multi-agent simulation model populated with zero-intelligence
plus (ZIP) financial trading agents. We demonstrate that ARIM offers a new opportunity for market makers
(MMs) to profit from buying and selling resources, but suggest that this opportunity may be fleeting. We also
demonstrate that altering the market mechanism from a retail market (where only sellers post offers; similar
to ARIM) to a continuous double auction (where both buyers and sellers post offers) can result in higher sale
prices and therefore higher comm
issions. Since IaaS is a multi-billion dollar industry and currently the fastest
growing segment of the cloud computing market, we therefore suggest that Amazon may profit from altering
the mechanism of ARIM to enable buyers to post bids.
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