Agent-Mediated Trading: Intelligent Agents and E-Business

One prevalent vision of agent-mediated trading on electronic marketplaces is that intelligent, economically driven agents will form a rich, diverse, dynamic economic Web, and that agent-to-agent e-commerce transactions may eventually dominate the global economy in the future. Agents may facilitate a variety of relevant functions such as advertising, matchmaking and brokering. Current application of single agent and multiagent systems for e-commerce and business include, for example, shopbots, agent-based virtual marketplaces and auctions, respectively. This paper presents a general survey of basic key enabling techniques which are needed to build such institutions of agent-mediated trading in the Internet, and examples of systems of economically rational behaving agents.