The recent rush towards electronic commerce over the Internet raises many challenges, this paper present a simple model of supply chains. First a model of supply chains is discussed, highlighting two characteristic features: hierarchical subtask decomposition, and resource contention. Then a market protocol based on distributed but concurrent auctions is proposed. The protocol allow each of these markets to function separately, while the information exchanged between a sequence of markets along a single supply chain to ensure 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.