Agent-Mediated Integrative Negotiation for Retail Electronic Commerce

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 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 integr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AMET
• Authors: Robert H. Guttman, Pattie Maes
• Keywords: AMET 1998, Integrative Negotiation, Intelligent Agents, Shopping Agents, Software Agent