Results from a Multi-Agent Electronic Marketplace Experiment

The potential for electronic commerce involving the buying and selling of goods, financial vehicles, and services on the Internet has not yet been fully realized. Although an increasing number of vendors and financial institutions maintain Web sites providing a convenient way for consumers to shop, these sites have not radically changed the shopping experience. Often, these Web sites are little more than online versions of product catalogs with search capabilities. Kasbah [Chavez96] is a multi-agent electronic marketplace that proposes to transform the online shopping experience by leveraging the unique features of the Internet and software agent technologies. This paper reports on the results of a multi-agent electronic marketplace experiment involving about two hundred participants using a slightly modified version of Kasbah. This experiment was conducted at MIT's Media Laboratory in October 1996.