Agent-Mediated Integrative Negotiation for Retail Electronic Commerce

  • Authors:
  • Robert H. Guttman;Pattie Maes

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • AMET '98 Selected Papers from the First International Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Trading on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

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 value-added services from consumer consideration. Likewise, the increasingly popular online auctions pit sellers against buyers in distributive negotiation tugof-wars 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.