Multi-attributes-based agent negotiation framework under incremental information disclosing strategy

As more and more consumer-to-consumer e-marketplaces have been introduced with rapidly increasing transaction volumes, consumers now hope that computer technology will support their transaction processes in these electronic markets. To satisfy their expectations, many researchers have delved into developing intelligent agent systems to support customer-to-customer electronic commerce more efficiently. However, many of these researchers have focused only upon supporting simple negotiation for the price of undifferentiated goods. To expand the object of negotiation to differentiated goods, customers should be allowed to negotiate over multiple attributes of the product besides the price, including attributes which are related to the transaction activity itself, such as delivery time and payment method. To satisfy this requirement, we propose an agent marketplace for differentiated goods where the agent of a customer can negotiate not only for the price but also various attributes of a product and transaction in order to provide a better utility level for both buyer and seller. To achieve these goals, we have developed a formal protocol and system architecture to support the proposed e-marketplace and individual agents, and a prototype system is developed to validate our approach and show that negotiation resulting from our scheme is Pareto optimal.