Ariba, Inc.

Cariocas, Inc.

Interval Research Corporation

Luckysurf.com, Inc.

Yoav Shoham

Moshe Tennenholtz

Pierfrancesco La Mura

Michael Wellman

Eithan Ephrati

Kirk Cruikshank

Greg Perry

A universal or special-purpose auction system and method are disclosed wherein at least one auction allocation policy is implemented which results in adjusting a bid submitted by a trader or a clearing calculation is modified to incorporate a constraint.

Method and an apparatus for a trading market design and deployment system

A system and method for managing multilateral negotiations are disclosed. The method generally includes sending a negotiation initiating offer object to a first negotiating party for specifying rules of the negotiation and for forming a negotiation initiating offer including specification of at least one attribute. The method also includes receiving the negotiation initiating offer from the first negotiating party, sending a counter offer object to a second negotiating party for forming a counter offer to the first negotiating party, receiving the counter offer from the second negotiating party, validating the counter offer if the counter offer complies with the rules of the negotiation, and sending the validated counter offer to the first negotiation party to engage the negotiation parties in an active negotiation. The counter offer object is adapted for specification of at least one additional attribute. A negotiation facilitator system for managing an electronic negotiation and a computer program product for managing a multilateral negotiation are also disclosed.

Electronic multilateral negotiation system

An auction system and method for suitable use with online transactions which provide a plurality of enhanced auctions is disclosed. The present invention extends, augments or otherwise enhances various auction elements including, for example, the selection of participants, the grouping of participants, the moves made by participants, the bidding process of participants, the information revelation process, the auction closing process, and the auction clearing process, among others. In addition, enhanced auction modules may be used separately or together during the auction process.

Enhanced auction mechanism for online transactions

A method of providing interactive online communication through a network comprising creating a population from a plurality of network participants in which the said participants are operatively coupled to participate in a game, then selecting a sub-population from the population based upon some pre-selected criteria, inviting the population to said game and receiving a confirmation from said sub-population.

Enhanced online game mechanisms

The Online Buyers Club System (OBCS) is a mechanism for the online purchasing of goods and services. The mechanism is targeted at user communities consisting of a large number of small-volume buyers (the &ldquo;Buyers Club&rdquo;). The primary function of the mechanism is to automatically aggregate the buying power of these buyers. The present invention provides a mechanism to promote competition among vendors as well as a mechanism to incent buyers to make a purchase.

Facilitator for aggregating buyer power in an on-line market system

An enhanced system and method for carrying out online transactions and auctions using a &ldquo;shopping games&rdquo; mechanism module is disclosed. The shopping games system provides for a mechanism scheme allowing &ldquo;game moves&rdquo; as well as bidding and message exchanging moves. The participants of the system may engage in game play in conjunction with an auction process, wherein the game play affects the auction process to provide a entertaining and amusing environment for participants to carry out online transactions without limiting the participants to traditional auction &ldquo;moves&rdquo;.

System and method for enhanced online transactions using shopping games

An enhanced system and method for carrying out online transactions and auctions using a &ldquo;shopping games&rdquo; mechanism module is disclosed. The shopping games system provides for a mechanism scheme allowing &ldquo;game moves&rdquo; as well as bidding and message exchanging moves. The participants of the system may engage in game play in conjunction with an auction process to provide an entertaining and amusing environment for participants to carry out online transactions without limiting the participants to traditional auction &ldquo;moves&rdquo;.

A method and an apparatus for a universal auction specification system is disclosed. The universal auction specification system comprises a network accessible set of trading primitives. A script generator is used for combining the set of trading primitives into a temporal protocol script representing a particular auction specification.

Universal on-line trading market design and deployment system

A system and method for adaptively traversing a network of linked textual or multi-media information utilizes one or more heuristics to explore the network and present information to a user. An exploration or search heuristic governs activity while examining and exploring the linked information resources, while a presentation heuristic controls presentation of a manageable amount of information resources to the user. The system and method accept relevance feedback from the user which is used to refine future search, retrieval, and presentation of information resources. The user may present an information query of various degrees of specificity or the system and method may search and present information resources based entirely on relevance feedback from the user.

Growing community of inventors

Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Yoav Shoham