Automated Product Pricing Using Argumentation

This paper describes an argumentation-based approach for automating the decision making process of an autonomous agent for pricing products. Product pricing usually involves different decision makers with different possibly conflicting points of view. Moreover, when considering firms in the retail business sector, they have hundreds or thousands of products to apply a pricing policy. Our approach allows for applying a price policy to each one of them by taking into account different points of view expressed through different arguments and the dynamic environment of the application. This is done because argumentation is a reasoning mechanism based on the construction and the evaluation of interacting conflicting arguments. We also show how we conceived and developed our agent using the Agent Systems Engineering Methodology (ASEME).