Intelligent Buyer Agent using Multi-Agent Cooperative Negotiation for Retail Electronic Commerce

For the purchase of a cheaper product on the Internet, many customers have been trying to search online shopping mall sites and visit comparison-pricing shops that compare prices and other criteria of the product. Others have been participating into online auction markets or group-buying markets. However, a lot of online shopping malls, auction markets, and group-buying markets provide the same product with different prices. Since these marketplaces have different price settlement mechanisms, it is very difficult for the customers to determine marketplace to purchase, considering different kinds of marketplaces at the same time. To overcome such limitations, decision rules and solution procedures for purchase decision making are necessary, which can cover multiple marketplaces simultaneously. For this purpose, purchase decision making in each market must be conducted to maximize customer’s utility, and conflicts with other marketplaces must be resolved. Therefore, we have developed the rules and methods that can negotiate cooperatively the purchase decision making in several marketplaces, and designed an architecture of Intelligent Buyer Agent and a message structure to support the idea.