The Electrical Bazaar: Agents in Retailing

A paradigm shift is taking place in logistics. The focus is changing from operational effectiveness to adaptation. Supply Chains will develop into networks that will adapt to consumer demand in almost real time. Time to market, capacity of adaptation and enrichment of customer experience seem to be the key elements of this new paradigm. In this environment emerging technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency ID), Intelligent Products and the Internet, are triggering that change. We present a Multiagent System framework for in retail that addresses these changes with rational agents that use gossip to augment the amount of information available and take advantage of local and global knowledge not only to asses the environment but to perform distributed testing in order to learn sensitivity to price and promotions.