A Generic Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce

Current electronic marketplaces emphasize the singular importance of price in matching buyers and sellers. Unable to adequately express their underlying preferences for all relevant attributes, buyers and sellers are forced to partake in an inflexible and antagonistic price-centric interplay. The result is an unfortunate, zero-sum circumstance of adversarial competitiveness, in which one party can benefit only at the expense of the other. "Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediaries" (MARI) is a project which proposes to improve online marketplaces. MARI is a domain-independent, generic agent-based architecture for electronic markets, which can be instantiated in different product domains. MARI represents an advance over current e-markets in the following ways: (i). It permits buyers and sellers to express multi-attribute preferences; (ii). It is multi-tiered, allowing buyers and sellers to express preferences not only for the attributes for the underlying product or service, but also for each other; and (iii). It facilitates significant automation, allowing software agents to act as proxies for buyers and sellers. MARI transcends bid and ask prices to include all relevant attributes as dimensions for consideration and differentiation, making it possible for both buyers and sellers alike to more holistically and comprehensively specify relative preferences, and making price just one of a multitude of possible factors influencing the choice of trading partner and the decision to trade. Buyers and sellers express their preferences, which permits agents to represent them and their "utility functions." The system then computes matches between buyer and seller agents in a Pareto optimal fashion, meaning that no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off, and implying that no potential gains are left unexploited. This thesis presents the theory behind MARI, the generic architecture, and an evaluation through the instantiation of the system in a services marketplace.