MoCAAS: auction agent system using a collaborative mobile agent in electronic commerce

To get the items that a buyer wants in an Internet auction, he must search for the items through several auction sites. When the bidding starts, the buyer needs to connect to these auction sites frequently so that he can monitor the bid states and re-bid. A reserve-price auction reduces the number of connections, but this limits the user’s bidding strategy. Another problem is equity between the buyer and the seller. Both the buyer and the seller should profit within proper limits. In this paper, we propose an auction agent system using a collaborative mobile agent and a brokering mechanism called MoCAAS (Mobile collaborative auction agent system), which mediates between the buyer and the seller and executes bidding asynchronously and autonomously. This reduces the network load more than with other auction-agents, offers more intelligent bidding, and increases the clear ratio. q 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.