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Agent-Mediated Integrative Negotiation for Retail Electronic Commerce

1999; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/3-540-48835-9_5

1611-3349

Robert Guttman, Pattie Maes,

Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing

Software agents help automate a variety of tasks including those involved in buying and selling products over the Internet. Although shopping agents provide convenience for consumers and yield more efficient markets, today's first-generation shopping agents are limited to comparing merchant offerings only on price instead of their full range of value. As such, they do a disservice to both consumers and retailers by hiding important merchant valueadded services from consumer consideration. Likewise, the increasingly popular online auctions pit sellers against buyers in distributive negotiation tugofwars over price. This paper analyzes these approaches from economic, behavioral, and software agent perspectives then proposes integrative negotiation as a more suitable approach to retail electronic commerce. Finally, we identify promising techniques (e.g., multi-attribute utility theory, distributed constraint satisfaction, and conjoint analysis) for implementing agent-mediated integrative negotiation.