Agent-based electronic commerce: opportunities and challenges

A trading agent that closely models the strategies and preferences of the person or business it represents should consider many possibilities for a single transaction. How these parallel negotiations occur will be a matter of strategy, processing power, governing policies and an agent's ability to manage complexity. An agent may even consider the things already owned by the buyer, other needs outside the transaction, or the status of related negotiations. However, even a versatile agent will be constrained by laws and policies outside its control. The research presented concerns self-interested agents working in opposition to, or at least not in cooperation with, the other parties to a transaction. We presume that buyer's and seller's agents have private valuations for the items under discussion. However, we do not presume that agents are confined to, or primarily interested in, the price of goods. Price-only negotiations may find each side attempting to merely exit a transaction with minimal personal loss. Further, although many kinds of transactions may be accurately modeled as auctions, we are looking beyond auctions to integrative activities, invoking more complete disclosures of qualities such as delivery terms and finely detailed descriptions of needs.