A Negotiation Model in Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce

Today's jrst generation shopping agent is limited to comparing merchant oflerings usually on price instead of their full range of attributes. Even in the full range comparison, there is not a good model which considers the overall features in the negotiation process. Therefore, the negotiation model needs to be extended to include negotiations over the more attributes. In this paper, we propose a negotiation model in the agent-mediated electronic commerce to negotiate over prices, product features, warranties, and service policies based on utility theoly and simple heuristics. We will describe a prototype agent-mediated electronic commerce framework called Pmart. This framework provides the sofware reuse and the extensibility based on the object-oriented technoloa. It is implemented on Windows-based platforms using Java and CORBA for the network transparency and platform independence. 1