A negotiation model in agent-mediated electronic commerce

Today's first generation shopping agent is limited to comparing merchant offerings usually on price instead of their full range of attributes. Even in the full range comparison, there is not a good model which considers the overall features in the negotiation process. Therefore, the negotiation model needs to be extended to include negotiations over more attributes. We propose a negotiation model in agent-mediated electronic commerce to negotiate over prices, product features, warranties, and service policies based on utility theory and simple heuristics. We describe a prototype agent-mediated electronic commerce framework called Pmart. This framework provides the software reuse and extensibility based on object-oriented technology. It is implemented on Windows-based platforms using Java and CORBA for the network transparency and platform independence.