Abstract:

Price coordination of supply chain of scholarly electronic journals is usually established by the relevant stakeholders’ continuous negotiations. This paper designs the process of procurement and bidding process among an institutional user agent, a database integrator agent and three journal publisher agents using multiagentbased computational experiment. It discusses using uncertain information to determine the optimal purchase price of scholarly electronic journals database procured by institutional user, and income distribution problems between journal publisher and database integrator. Then, the experiment analyzes the respective ROI for institutional user and database integrator in both cases that the expected return is certain and the expected return is uncertain. According to the experimental results, this paper put forward the purchase price and bidding strategy for each of the parties.

Key words: Scholarly electronic journals, Supply chain, Price coordination, Computational experiment