Software agents help automate a variety of tasks including those involved in buying and selling products over the Internet. This paper surveys several of these agent-mediated electronic commerce systems by describing their roles in the context of a Consumer Buying Behavior (CBB) model. The CBB model we present augments traditional marketing models with concepts from Software Agents research to ...

This paper presents a model that explains the recent evolution of e-commerce, where over time, prices can increase if no exit occurs, or decrease, if exit occurs. In the model there is uncertainty about the firms' costs, because the technology is new, and consumers face a switching cost, because it is easier to observe the current price of a previous supplier, than the price of other firms.

Interorganizational information systems, i.e., systems spanning more than a single organization, are proliferating as companies become aware of the potential of these systems to affect interorganizational interactions in terms of economic efficiency and strategic conduct. This new technology can have far-reaching impacts on the structure of entire industries. This article identifies two types o...

Recent years have seen an enormous increase in the role of information technology in markets. During the past few years, economists, game theorists, and computer scientists have started to take a direct role by designing various kinds of market mechanisms for electronic markets in various industries. What is so special about "electronic" market design is the fact that a designer has many more p...

Intermediation in markets is a phenomenon that has been studied by many researchers from a variety of different theoretical angles. With the introduction and diffusion of the Internet in everyday life, broad predictions were made that called for disintermediation enabled by direct Internet linkages between suppliers and buyers and lower transaction costs. The often-cited paper by Sarkar, Butler...

In this paper we characterize the different tasks mobile agents can perform for their users on electronic markets. These tasks imply various risks that have to be addressed by protection mechanisms, not only to protect the market servers from malicious agents, but also to prevent the mobile agents from malicious hosts. To achieve the latter is quite difficult, because in order to execute the ag...

While traditional IS design literature emphasizes understanding of end users from perspectives such as cognitive fit and technology acceptance, it fails to consider the economic dimensions of their interactions with a system. When viewed as economic agents who participate in electronic markets, it is easy to see that users’ preferences, behaviors, personalities, and ultimately their economic we...

Evolving e-commerce technologies increasingly enable organisations to participate in different types of network forms or in electronic markets with previously unidentified trading partners. Virtual organisations (VO) take different forms, have varying lifecycles and involve different scope and depth of relationships. This paper examines the literature in terms of the terminology of virtual orga...

Evolving e-commerce technologies increasingly enable organisations to participate in different types of network forms or in electronic markets with previously unidentified trading partners. Virtual organisations (VO) take different forms, have varying lifecycles and involve different scope and depth of relationships. This paper examines the literature in terms of the terminology of virtual orga...

Participating in electronic markets and conducting business online inadvertedly involves the decision to trust other participants. In this paper we consider trust as a concept that self-interested agents populating an electronic marketplace can use to take decisions on who they are going to transact with. We are interested in looking at the effects that trust and its attributes as well as trust...