E-commerce and decision technologies: research opportunities and challenges

In this talk, the author motivates the important role that decision technologies play in electronic commerce. Decision technologies - algorithmic and model-based methods to assist decision-making - are a contribution of scholars in the operations research and management science (OR/MS) communities. In conjunction with information technologies, they power many electronic commerce applications. To provide context and to motivate key research themes addressed in this literature, the author draws on his own work and a recent set of special issues on electronic commerce of the management science journal that he co-edited. In particular, he proposes to highlight work in a set of diverse e-commerce topics such as shopbot design, evaluation of information revelation policies and incremental bidding mechanisms in e-markets, peer-to-peer infrastructure design for digital goods and privacy. In each of these illustrative examples, he sketches methodological approaches (e.g., Markov decision processes, game theory, mathematical programming, statistical analysis) underlying the decision technologies and discuss opportunities for further work. The objective is to engender further interest in research opportunities at the intersection of computer science and OR/MS.