Agent based mobile negotiation for personalized pricing of last minute theatre tickets

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.This paper proposes an agent based mobile negotiation framework for personalized pricing of last minutes theatre tickets whose values are dependent on the time remaining to the performance and the locations of potential customers. In particular, case based reasoning and fuzzy cognitive map techniques are adopted in the negotiation framework to identify the best initial offer zone and adopt multi criteria decision in the scoring function to evaluate offers. The proposed framework is tested via a computer simulation in which personalized pricing policy shows higher market performance than other policies therefore the validity of the proposed negotiation framework.The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea

Brokerage Platform for Media Content Recommendation

Near real time media content personalisation is nowadays a major challenge involving media content sources, distributors and viewers. This paper describes an approach to seamless recommendation, negotiation and transaction of personalised media content. It adopts an integrated view of the problem by proposing, on the business-to-business (B2B) side, a brokerage platform to negotiate the media items on behalf of the media content distributors and sources, providing viewers, on the business-to-consumer (B2C) side, with a personalised electronic programme guide (EPG) containing the set of recommended items after negotiation. In this setup, when a viewer connects, the distributor looks up and invites sources to negotiate the contents of the viewer personal EPG. The proposed multi-agent brokerage platform is structured in four layers, modelling the registration, service agreement, partner lookup, invitation as well as item recommendation, negotiation and transaction stages of the B2B processes. The recommendation service is a rule-based switch hybrid filter, including six collaborative and two content-based filters. The rule-based system selects, at runtime, the filter(s) to apply as well as the final set of recommendations to present. The filter selection is based on the data available, ranging from the history of items watched to the ratings and/or tags assigned to the items by the viewer. Additionally, this module implements (i) a novel item stereotype to represent newly arrived items, (ii) a standard user stereotype for new users, (iii) a novel passive user tag cloud stereotype for socially passive users, and (iv) a new content-based filter named the collinearity and proximity similarity (CPS). At the end of the paper, we present off-line results and a case study describing how the recommendation service works. The proposed system provides, to our knowledge, an excellent holistic solution to the problem of recommending multimedia contents

Prediction Strategy for E-Commerce Price Negotiation

Automated negotiation plays an important role in dynamic trading online, especially in B2C e-commerce, as it is crucially useful for the online merchants to achieve better trading outcomes and save vast trading cost. To address the critical issue, this paper develops a prediction strategy that using linear regression to predict the opponent’s future offer trend, the theoretical model and the algorithm are proposed. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this model, we develop a prototype and conduct computer-computer automated negotiation to make comparison with the previous negotiation strategy model. The experimental result shows that the agent with our newly designed strategy model can significantly increase the agreement rate and joint outcome of the both sides

Nego : a virtual negociation market

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Quality Dimensions for B2C E-Commerce

Organizations have still not realized the full potential of e-commerce. One factor that is likely to influence the further adoption of e-commerce is the quality of the e-commerce system as system quality impacts user satisfaction and hence use of the system. However, in order to improve the quality of any systems, one first needs to identify measures to assess quality. Although other researchers have recognized the need for such measures, they have primarily focused on a single specific aspect of e-commerce systems, typically the user interface. In this paper we identify the key components of e-commerce systems and synthesize existing research related to quality of these components to arrive at a comprehensive list of quality dimensions, which in turn provide measures to assess the quality of e-commerce systems

Conceptual Architecture for Agent-Based Modelling of Supplier Selection Conducted by a Supply Chain Dyad

Within the fourth stage of industrialization, artificial intelligence and in particular the multi-agent systems paradigm is highly adopted. Within the agent approach, the industrial resources are defined as intelligent agents that negotiate with each other to implement dynamic reconfiguration and reach agility and higher customer satisfaction. In this paper a smart configuration of the agent-based system for multi-product dyadic supplier selection is proposed. The objective is to select suppliers for multiple products simultaneously in a vertical collaboration context while involving the customer of the purchasing company and considering its preferences. Negotiation experiments are conducted for initial validation of the proposed conceptual architecture

Enhancing Agent Mediated Electronic Markets with Ontology Matching Services and Social Network Support

Os Mercados Eletrónicos atingiram uma complexidade e nível de sofisticação tão elevados, que tornaram inadequados os modelos de software convencionais. Estes mercados são caracterizados por serem abertos, dinâmicos e competitivos, e constituídos por várias entidades independentes e heterogéneas. Tais entidades desempenham os seus papéis de forma autónoma, seguindo os seus objetivos, reagindo às ocorrências do ambiente em que se inserem e interagindo umas com as outras. Esta realidade levou a que existisse por parte da comunidade científica um especial interesse no estudo da negociação automática executada por agentes de software [Zhang et al., 2011]. No entanto, a diversidade dos atores envolvidos pode levar à existência de diferentes conceptualizações das suas necessidades e capacidades dando origem a incompatibilidades semânticas, que podem prejudicar a negociação e impedir a ocorrência de transações que satisfaçam as partes envolvidas. Os novos mercados devem, assim, possuir mecanismos que lhes permitam exibir novas capacidades, nomeadamente a capacidade de auxiliar na comunicação entre os diferentes agentes. Pelo que, é defendido neste trabalho que os mercados devem oferecer serviços de ontologias que permitam facilitar a interoperabilidade entre os agentes. No entanto, os humanos tendem a ser relutantes em aceitar a conceptualização de outros, a não ser que sejam convencidos de que poderão conseguir um bom negócio. Neste contexto, a aplicação e exploração de relações capturadas em redes sociais pode resultar no estabelecimento de relações de confiança entre vendedores e consumidores, e ao mesmo tempo, conduzir a um aumento da eficiência da negociação e consequentemente na satisfação das partes envolvidas. O sistema AEMOS é uma plataforma de comércio eletrónico baseada em agentes que inclui serviços de ontologias, mais especificamente, serviços de alinhamento de ontologias, incluindo a recomendação de possíveis alinhamentos entre as ontologias dos parceiros de negociação. Este sistema inclui também uma componente baseada numa rede social, que é construída aplicando técnicas de análise de redes socias sobre informação recolhida pelo mercado, e que permite melhorar a recomendação de alinhamentos e auxiliar os agentes na sua escolha. Neste trabalho são apresentados o desenvolvimento e implementação do sistema AEMOS, mais concretamente: • É proposto um novo modelo para comércio eletrónico baseado em agentes que disponibiliza serviços de ontologias; • Adicionalmente propõem-se o uso de redes sociais emergentes para captar e explorar informação sobre relações entre os diferentes parceiros de negócio; • É definida e implementada uma componente de serviços de ontologias que é capaz de: • o Sugerir alinhamentos entre ontologias para pares de agentes; • o Traduzir mensagens escritas de acordo com uma ontologia em mensagens escritas de acordo com outra, utilizando alinhamentos previamente aprovados; • o Melhorar os seus próprios serviços recorrendo às funcionalidades disponibilizadas pela componente de redes sociais; • É definida e implementada uma componente de redes sociais que: • o É capaz de construir e gerir um grafo de relações de proximidade entre agentes, e de relações de adequação de alinhamentos a agentes, tendo em conta os perfis, comportamento e interação dos agentes, bem como a cobertura e utilização dos alinhamentos; • o Explora e adapta técnicas e algoritmos de análise de redes sociais às várias fases dos processos do mercado eletrónico. A implementação e experimentação do modelo proposto demonstra como a colaboração entre os diferentes agentes pode ser vantajosa na melhoria do desempenho do sistema e como a inclusão e combinação de serviços de ontologias e redes sociais se reflete na eficiência da negociação de transações e na dinâmica do mercado como um todo.In electronic commerce, the diversity of the involved actors can lead to different conceptualizations of their needs and capabilities, giving rise to semantic incompatibilities that might hamper negotiations and the fulfilling of satisfactory transactions. In order to provide help in conversation among different actors, markets must offer ontology services to facilitate interoperability. However, humans tend to be reluctant to accept others’ conceptualizations, except if they become convinced that a good deal can be achieved. In this context, the application and exploitation of relationships captured by social networks can result in the establishment of more accurate trust relationships between businesses and customers, as well as the improvement of the negotiation efficiency and therefore the users’ satisfaction with the electronic commerce system. The AEMOS system is an agent-based electronic commerce platform that provides ontology matching services in order to facilitate the interoperability between agents that use different ontologies. AEMOS also includes a social network component that allows improving the ontology alignment recommendations and supporting the agents’ decisions about which alignments to select based on the information collected throughout the market and by exploring social network analysis techniques. This work presents the development and implementation of the AEMOS system, illustrating how the collaboration between the different agents can be helpful in improving the system’s performance, and how the inclusion and combination of ontology services and social networks reflects in the efficiency of the negotiation process