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Shopbots and Pricebots

  • Conference paper
Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce II (AMEC 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1788))

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Abstract

Shopbots are software agents that automatically gather and collate information from multiple on-line vendors about the price and quality of consumer goods and services. Rapidly increasing in number and sophistication, shopbots are helping more and more buyers minimize expenditure and maximize satisfaction. In response to this trend, it is anticipated that sellers will come to rely on pricebots, automated agents that employ price-setting algorithms in an attempt to maximize profits. In this paper, a simple economic model is proposed and analyzed, which is intended to characterize some of the likely impacts of a proliferation of shopbots and pricebots.

In addition to describing theoretical investigations, this paper also aims toward a practical understanding of the tradeoffs between profitability and computational and informational complexity of pricebot algorithms. A comparative study of a series of price-setting strategies is presented, including: game-theoretic (GT), myoptimal (MY), derivative following (DF), and no regret learning (NR). The dynamic behavior that arises among collections of pricebots and shopbot-assisted buyers is simulated, and it is found that game-theoretic equilibria can dynamically arise in our model of shopbots and pricebots.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Institute for Advanced Commerce, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, 10598, USA

    Amy R. Greenwald & Jeffrey O. Kephart

Authors
  1. Amy R. Greenwald
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  2. Jeffrey O. Kephart
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Media Laboratory, MA 02139, Cambridge, USA

    Alexandros Moukas

  2. Enersearch AB and Computing Science Department, Information Technology Uppsala University, Chalmers Science Park, SE - 412 88, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Fredrik Ygge

  3. Institut d’Investigació en Intel·ligència Artificial, Barcelona, Spain

    Carles Sierra

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Greenwald, A.R., Kephart, J.O. (2000). Shopbots and Pricebots. In: Moukas, A., Ygge, F., Sierra, C. (eds) Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce II. AMEC 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1788. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10720026_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10720026_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67773-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44982-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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