Attribute Utility-Based Negotiation Agent Methodology for Customer-To-Customer Electronic Commerce
U Song Yong, S Hong June, Wooju Kim · Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems · 2004
Since people have come to access more and more information about products with the proliferation of the Internet, more and more customer-to-customer e-marketplaces are being introduced with rapidly increasing transaction volumes. As the role of customer-to-customer electronic commerce has become increasingly regarded as vital to the economy, much research has delved into developing intelligent agent systems to efficiently support customer-to-customer electronic commerce. Most of this research, however, has focused only on supporting simple negotiation for the price of common goods along the time span. To expand the negotiation object to the differentiated goods, the customer must be allowed to negotiate over multi-at-tributes of the product besides the price, including the attributes related to the transaction activity itself, such as delivery time and payment method. To satisfy this requirement, we propose an agent marketplace for differentiated goods where the agent of a customer can negotiate not only the price but also the various attributes of the product and the transaction in order to achieve a better utility level for both buyer and seller. The formal protocol and the architecture issues to support the proposed e-marketplace and agents are also addressed.