Abstract
Consider a computer assisted trading system in which the needs and the products of the traders are compared by a computer system and the trading proceeds without attaching a dollar price to each commodity. In such a system the computer serves as an “intelligent” communication link between traders, enhancing the ability of producers and consumers to exchange goods. In this paper, we examine one computational aspect of such computerized trading schemes: Given a list of trading proposals (each proposal specifying the quantities of the commodities to be traded), how should one arrange the trades so that the maximum number of trades can be made in the market? We show that this maximum trade problem is computationally hard; it is NP-complete (Nondeterministic Polynomial Time Complete). We then describe some related open questions and potential solutions.
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Parnas, D.L. The Impact of Money-free Computer Assisted Barter Systems. Technical Report DCS-48-IR, July, 1985, Department of Computer Science, Victoria, B.C. V8W 2Y2, Canada.
Garey, M.R. and Johnson, D.S. Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-completeness. San Francisco, CA: Freeman, 1979.
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This research is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Grant No. OPG0090391 and OPG0009129.
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Luo, Z.Q., Parnas, D.L. On the computational complexity of the maximum trade problem. Acta Mathematicae Applicatae Sinica 10, 434–440 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02016333
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02016333