Automated Purchase Negotiations in a Dynamic Electronic Marketplace

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a surge of B2C and B2B e-commerce operated on the Internet. However, many of these systems are often nothing more than electronic product or service catalogues. Against this background, it is argued that new generation systems based on automatic negotiation will emerge. This paper covers a particular kind of automatic negotiation systems, where a number of participants in a mobile dynamic electronic marketplace automatically negotiate the purchase of products or services, by means of multiple automated one-to-one bargainings. In a dynamic e-marketplace, the number of buyers and sellers and their preferences may change over time. By mobile we mean that buyers in a commercial area may initiate simultaneous negotiations with several sellers using portable devices like cell phones, laptops or personal digital assistants, so these negotiations do not require participants to be colocated in space. We will show how an expressive approach to fuzzy constraint based agent purchase negotiations in competitive trading environments, is ideally suited to work on these kind of e-marketplaces. An example of mobile e-marketplace, and a comparison between an expressive and an inexpressive approach will be presented to show the efficiency of the proposed solution.