Modeling Business Negotiations for Electronic Commerce
Abstract
E-commerce "localizes global markets" by opening remote markets to retail and to small companies. Newly developed E-commerce tools allow individual and organizational buyers to search for suppliers anywhere and make deals electronically. We propose a software agent that interacts with a buyer and elicits information about the criteria, preferences, and limitations, and that conducts business negotiation on behalf of the buyer. The agent has been implemented and tested in Negoplan, a software system that supports the simulation of decision processes. Results of several negotiation simulations are presented.