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A quantitative foundation for defining and manipulating deals to facilitate automated e-commerce

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Abstract

We propose a goal programming framework that aims at automating e-commerce transactions. This framework consists of three basic layers: deal definition—defining the deal’s parameters and associated constraints (e.g., item, price, delivery dates); deal manipulation—a collection of procedures for shaping deals to attain desired goals (e.g., earliest delivery and minimum price) and an applications layer that employs these procedures within some negotiations settings (e.g., an auction-related application presents a “better offer” while bidding on a contract). Our proposed foundation is rich enough to support a wide array of applications ranging from 1-1 and 1-n negotiations (auctions) to deal valuation and deal splitting. Whereas the techniques are appropriate to a multitude of settings, we shall mainly present them in the context of business-to-business (B2B) commerce where we see the greatest short term benefits.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 32000, Israel

    Boaz Golany

  2. Computer Science Faculty, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 32000, Israel

    Oded Shmueli

Authors
  1. Boaz Golany
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  2. Oded Shmueli
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Boaz Golany.

Additional information

O. Shmueli’s work is partially supported by the Fund for the Promotion of Research at the Technion.

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Golany, B., Shmueli, O. A quantitative foundation for defining and manipulating deals to facilitate automated e-commerce. Electron Commerce Res 7, 341–365 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-007-9010-9

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