Abstract

In a world, where more and more businesses seem to trade in an online market, the supply of online
services to supply the ever-growing demand could quickly reach its capacity limits. Online service
providers may find themselves maxed out at peak operation levels during high-traffic timeslots but too
little demand during low-traffic timeslots, although the latter is becoming less frequent. At this point
not only deciding which user is allocated what level of service becomes essential, but also the
magnitude of the service provided, can be controlled by pricing. Pricing is an important factor when
efficient and acceptable allocation of resources between individuals must be reached. Without prices,
transferring or sharing goods would be impossible. In sharing information, pricing a product however
is not as simple as relatively pricing an apple or a pear. Often the costs, and hence the prices are
simply unknown. Backed by this scenario, the online services market could be combined with the
market design mechanism of diamonds. For this we propose an ultimatum pricing strategy which
effectively allows for valuations to be accounted for, but no longer a necessity when pricing in grid,
cloud or other online computing environments.

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