Optimal Quality of Information Service in an Electronic Commerce Website

Abstract

Multiple sellers can post their goods information through an online electronic commerce website, e.g., ebay, AliExpress, Amazon. The goods information post by a seller can attract the users who are originally interested in the goods from the other sellers, and thus the information post by a seller may reduce the influence of information from the other sellers, e.g., discourage customers to purchase goods from the other sellers especially when these sellers are competitors. In consideration of two classes of priority for sellers, we develop an admission control algorithm which temporarily removes low-priority sellers when a few high-priority sellers complain about their confusion caused by the others. We proof that the proposed algorithm can achieve the minimal number of sellers who have to be removed, subject to the constraint of an acceptable level of confusion at all of high-priority sellers. Also we investigate the admission control algorithm under a few more general settings, including the multiple-priority setting as well as the setting in which not all of high-priority sellers can attain their acceptable level of confusion even after removing all of low-priority sellers. Finally, under the structure of quite a few typical social networks, we show that the proposed admission control algorithm can efficiently solve the problem of mitigating confusion at high-priority sellers under various structures of social networks.