Towards agent-based decision making in the electronic marketplace: interactive recommendation and automated negotiation

The bloom of electronic commerce has changed the whole outlook of traditional trading behavior. Through the Internet, different business entities can now easily interact with each other and then have their transactions within a minimum time. However, the advanced hardware facilities for Internet infrastructure and the entrancing Web sites are not the only decisive factors to guarantee a successful business in the electronic market. To enable the transactions, the problems that ensue during the complicated activities in electronic commerce have to be resolved. This paper presents an agent-based system to support two types of activities most related to the decision-making process in the Internet commerce. The first part of our system is for interactive recommendation; and the second part, for automated negotiation. Experiments have been conducted to evaluate their corresponding performance and the results show the efficiency of the proposed system and its potential toward the future electronic market. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.