An agent system for comparative shopping at the point of sale

In this paper we combine ideas of electronic commerce and mobile environments in agent-based transaction systems. Shopping for goods and services can be highly time-consuming. Although there is increasingly more information available via the Internet to make educated buying decisions, there are still computational limitations on gathering, filtering, and analyzing such data. This is especially the case at point-of-sale where consumers lack expedient resources to perform comparison shopping activities. In this paper we present a framework for agent based electronic commerce, we discuss how we applied this framework to the domains of classified ads and comparative shopping, and we present a set of experiments we performed on the behavior of the agents and the feasibility of our underlying architecture.