Multi-attributes-Based Negotiation Agent and E-marketplace in Customer-to-Customer Electronic Commerce

Abstract

Since people have come to access more and more information about products with the proliferation of the Internet, more and more customer-to-customer e-marketplaces are being introduced with rapidly increasing transaction volumes. Much research has delved into developing intelligent agent systems to efficiently support customer-to-customer EC. However, most of this research has focused only on supporting simple negotiation for the price of common goods. To expand the negotiation object to the differentiated goods, the customer must be allowed to negotiate over multi-attributes of the product besides the price. To satisfy this requirement, we propose an agent marketplace for differentiated goods where the agent of a customer can negotiate not only the price but also the various attributes of the product and the transaction. The formal protocol and the architecture issues to support the proposed e-marketplace and agents are also addressed.