A Group Buy Protocol based on Coalition Formation for Agent-mediated E-Commerce

Electronic commerce is becoming an increasingly important channel for retail commerce. There are a large number of e-commerce sites on the Internet. Intelligent agents have been studied very widely in the field of artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. There have been several researches on agent-mediated electronic commerce. In particular, we focus on volume discount mechanism based on agent-mediated electronic commerce. In this paper, we propose a new group buy scheme for agent-mediated electronic markets. In this scheme, we introduce the concept of sequential decisionmaking for seller agents and buyer agents. Further, we propose a cooperation mechanism among seller agents based on exchange items in stock. We implemented an agent-mediated electronic markets based on the group buy scheme. The result shows that the new group buy scheme is effective in supporting electronic commerce based on volume discount.