Kasbah: An Agent Marketplace for Buying and Selling Goods
Anthony Chavez, Pattie Maes · 1997
While there are many Web services which help users find things to buy, we know of none which actually try to automate the process of buying and selling. Kasbah is a virtual marketplace on the Web where users create autonomous agents to buy and sell goods on their behalf. Users specify parameters to guide and constrain an agent's overall behavior. A simple prototype has been built to test the viability of this concept. Introduction Kasbah is a Web-based system where users create autonomous agents that buy and sell goods on their behalf. Our original idea was to reinvent the classified ads. We observed that there are many sites on the Web that post ads. Some of these sites allow users to perform keyword searches on the ads (Seattle Times/PI 1996). Some have their ads nicely categorized, making it easier to find ones of interest (ADWorld 1996). Other sites have more advanced searching capabilities. For example, Stanford's Infomaster (Infomaster 1995) (Geddis et al. 1995) allows users to ...