  With the recent technological feasibility of electronic commerce over the
Internet, much attention has been given to the design of electronic markets for
various types of electronically-tradable goods. Such markets, however, will
normally need to function in some relationship with markets for other related
goods, usually those downstream or upstream in the supply chain. Thus, for
example, an electronic market for rubber tires for trucks will likely need to
be strongly influenced by the rubber market as well as by the truck market. In
this paper we design protocols for exchange of information between a sequence
of markets along a single supply chain. These protocols allow each of these
markets to function separately, while the information exchanged ensures
efficient global behavior across the supply chain. Each market that forms a
link in the supply chain operates as a double auction, where the bids on one
side of the double auction come from bidders in the corresponding segment of
the industry, and the bids on the other side are synthetically generated by the
protocol to express the combined information from all other links in the chain.
The double auctions in each of the markets can be of several types, and we
study several variants of incentive compatible double auctions, comparing them
in terms of their efficiency and of the market revenue.
