Agents in Electronic Commerce

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The pervasive connectivity of the Internet and the powerful architecture of World Wide Web are changing many market conventions and creating a tremendous opportunity for conducting business on Internet. Intelligent agents will play a crucial role in electronic commerce where dynamic and heterogeneous interactions between tens of thousands of organizations and tens of millions of individuals are involved. So far, we have already witnessed the involvements of e-commerce agents in traditional business settings. Furthermore, these involvements are re-shaping the ways business is conducted in areas such as comparison shopping, pricing, negotiation, auction, and brokerages, to name a few. The automation brought by e-commerce agents dramatically reduces certain types of frictional costs and time incurred in the exchange of commodities. This special issue contains revised and extended versions of papers selected from 47 papers that were submitted to Workshop on Agents in Electronic Commerce (WAEC’99), held in Hong Kong on December 14, 1999. WAEC’99 was a landmark workshop for The First Asia–Pacific Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT’99) and was coorganized by researchers from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Hong Kong Baptist University. The goal of this special issue is to provide in a timely fashion the state of the art in agents in e-commerce and to share the intellectual excitement in an area where industry moves faster than academia in many situations. The papers selected for this special issue show a very good cross section of the multidisciplinary perspective of the area: agents in electronic supply chain, interface e-commerce agents, negotiation agents, security issues for agents and mobile agents, agent based e-market simulation, and legal issues for agents in e-market. Businesses of all sizes and industries continue to enter into Electronic Commerce. Digital marketplace business models are tearing down walls within and between companies. They bring together buyers and sellers in one interoperable community and rewrite the old linear supply chain with networked models. These models introduce profound changes in the way business are set up and operated and intensify the forces of supply and demand. The paper by Pinar Keskinocak, Richard Goodwin, Frederick Wu, Rama Akkiraju and Sesh Murthy presents a system that aims at using intelligent agents to streamline business decision process, reduce expenses and increase revenues. The system can assist a decision