Essay About Electronic Commerce And New Mode Of Commerce

On Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce
Essay title: On Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce
1 INTRODUCTION
ELECTRONIC commerce (e-commerce) is increasingly assuming
a pivotal role in many organizations. It offers
opportunities to significantly improve (make faster, cheaper,
more personalized, and/or more agile) the way that
businesses interact with both their customers and their
suppliers. However, in order to harness the full potential of
this new mode of commerce, a broad range of social, legal,
and technical issues need to be addressed. These issues
relate to things such as security, trust, payment mechanisms,
advertising, logistics, and back office management
[152], [45], [138], [169].
Even more fundamental than these issues, however, is
the very nature of the various actors that are involved in ecommerce
transactions. In most current (first generation) ecommerce
applications, the buyers are generally humans
who typically browse through a catalog of well-defined
commodities (e.g., flights, books, compact discs, computer
components) and make (fixed price) purchases (often by
means of a credit card transaction). However, this modus
operandi is only scratching the surface of what is possible.
By increasing the degree and the sophistication of the
automation, on both the buyer’s and the seller’s side,
commerce becomes much more dynamic, personalized, and
context sensitive. These changes can be of benefit to both
the buyers and the sellers. From the buyer’s perspective, it
is desirable to have software that could crawl all the
available outlets to find the most suitable one for purchasing
the chosen good (e.g., the one that offers the cheapest
price, the highest quality, or the fastest delivery time) and
that could then go through the process of actually
purchasing the good, paying for it, and arranging delivery
at an appropriate time. From a seller’s perspective, it is
desirable to have software that could vary its offering (in
terms of price, quality, warranty, and so on) depending on:
the customer it is dealing with (e.g., offering discounts or
special offers to particular target groups), what its competitors
are doing (e.g., continuously monitoring their prices
and making sure its own price is competitive), and the
current state of its business (e.g., if it has plenty of a
particular item in stock, it may be appropriate to reduce the
price in order to try and increase demand).
To achieve this degree of automation and move to
second generation e-commerce1 applications, we believe
that a new model of software is needed. This model is based
upon the notion of interacting agents [64] (hence, the term
“agent-mediated electronic commerce”). Against this background,
the aim of this paper is to motivate the use of
agents in e-commerce, to highlight the roles that agents can
and are fulfilling in this domain, and to review some of the
key technologies that underpin this vision. First, however,
we define exactly what we mean by the terms “agent” and
“electronic commerce.”
1.1 Interacting Agents