Bilateral Matching Decision-Making Method Considering Regret Avoidance in Second-Hand Transactions

Introduction

With the rapid development of the domestic economy, the second-hand goods trade has become an important part of the market transaction. Effective and professional trading services are able to create value-added activities and customized solutions to satisfy the requirements of both the sellers and buyers (Wang & Li, 2017; Edmund,2020). In the real trading market, there are three players: the second-hand goods sellers (suppliers) who provide the second-hand goods to be selected, buyers (demanders) who seek the goods, and the intermediaries who match the sellers and the buyers (Zeithaml et al., 1993; Goran et al., 2021). With the popularity of e-commerce, online and offline platforms of second-hand goods transaction intermediaries have become an important media for bilateral matching. Since the individuation of second-hand goods demand and the diversity of supply appear significantly, a proper match between the sellers and buyers has become increasingly important. As information and resources are often restricted or proprietary, it has become necessary for the second-hand goods sellers or buyers to use the expert knowledge services of intermediaries as a bridge to find suitable partners. Consequently, bilateral matching problems among sellers, intermediaries, and buyers have emerged and have been studied by many colleges (Benassi & Minin,2009; Belleflamme & Peitz, 2019; Italo & Oswaldo, 2020; Edmund, 2020; Cullen & Farronato, 2021; Yash & Daniela, 2021).

Bilateral matching problems have extensive practical backgrounds and exist widely in various bilateral matching markets. Gale and Shapley (1962) first studied renowned bilateral matching problems with ordinal preferences. After the initial study of Gale and Shapley, a large number of bilateral matching theories were proposed (Roth,1985; Rothblum, 1992; Roth et al.,1993; Sasaki & Toda, 1996; Bloch & Ryder, 2000; Manlove et al., 2002; Echenique & Oviedo,2004; Pais,2008; Hatfield & Kojima,2010; Jiang et al.,2011; Azevedo, 2014; Yu et al.,2018; Halaburda et al.,2018; Hu & Zhou,2018; Zhang et al.,2019; Liang et al.,2020; Michael & Christopher, 2021). Hence, the research on bilateral matching is meaningful in theory and valuable in practice. However, throughout the existing literature, it is well known that the prior research focused more on obtaining stable matching schemes with the preferences of both matching parties.