Agents and Electronic Commerce, Hype and Reality

In recent years electronic commerce has been at the centre of interest of many companies and also of many researchers. See the International Journal on Electronic Commerce (IJEC) for current research topics and e.g. (Kalakota and Whinston 1996, Kalakota and Robinson 2001) for an overview. However, after a period of a growing world economy in which electronic commerce was advocated as one of the motors of the new economy, at the moment we experience a set back that makes many people doubt the true value of electronic commerce for the economy. In fact what we are experiencing is the maturing of a new way of doing business based on new paradigms. In order to assess the role of IT, and especially software agents, in this development it is paramount to have at least some understanding of this new way of doing business. If electronic commerce is seen only as a way to use the Internet as a new channel through which products can be traded then the role of IT is quite limited. It should provide efficient means to build websites that are secure and robust and that can be connected to the back-office in order to process the incoming orders.