Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Dynamic pricing by software agents
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking - electronic commerce
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
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
Scaling-up shopbots: a dynamic allocation-based approach
Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
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This paper considers markets mediated by self-interested comparison shopping agents. The comparative search conducted by the agents is driven by incentives offered by sellers, the cost incurred by the search, and competition dynamics that arise in the multi-agent setting. Based on models of economic search theory, the paper provides a formal analysis of the strategies used by the agents and the corresponding expected buyers’ expense and sellers’ net revenue. Equilibrium analysis is given for homogeneous environments in which all agents share the same search characteristics. Using this latter environment, it is demonstrated how the transition to competitive comparison-shopping mediated market can in some cases result both with lower expected expense to buyers and higher expected net revenue to sellers.