SODA '94 Proceedings of the fifth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Preemptive Scheduling with Release Times, Deadlines, and Due Times
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
IJCAI '99 Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
On Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Agent-mediated electronic commerce: a survey
The Knowledge Engineering Review
On the Depth and Dynamics of Online Search Behavior
Management Science
On-demand bounded broadcast scheduling with tight deadlines
CATS '06 Proceedings of the 12th Computing: The Australasian Theroy Symposium - Volume 51
Competitive Comparison-Shopping Mediated Markets
WI-IAT '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02
Competitive Shopbots-Mediated Markets
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
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In this paper we consider the problem of eCommerce comparison shopping agents (shopbots) that are limited by capacity constraints. In light of the phenomenal increase both in demand for price comparison services over the internet and in the number of opportunities available in electronic markets, shopbots are nowadays required to improve the utilization of their finite set of querying resources. In this paper we introduce PlanBot, an innovative shopbot which uniquely integrates concepts from production management and economic search theory. PlanBot aims to maximize its efficiency by dynamically re-planning the allocation of its querying resources according to the results of formerly executed queries and new arriving requests. We detail the design principles that drive the PlanBot's operation and illustrate its improved performance (in comparison to the traditional shopbots' First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) query execution mechanisms) using a simulated environment which is based on price datasets collected over the internet. Our encouraging results suggest that the design principles we apply have the potential of being used as an infrastructure for various implementations of future comparison shopping agents.