Computational Commerce: A Vision for the Future

The proliferation of goods and services offered online and the growing number of e-consumers are catalysts for the ongoing burgeoning of e-commerce. Many industries have adopted e-commerce technologies to optimize and automate business processes. Despite the co-dependent relation between fundamental e-commerce components—negotiation, contracts, and business workflow—research and development is greatly done in isolation, conveying divergent and disconnected technologies. We provide a vision of the future of e-commerce along with a model of decentralized computation exchange—grounded on the COAST architectural style—which consolidates negotiation, contracts, and business workflow.