Contract Negotiation in E-Marketplaces

The advancement in distributed and intelligent computing has facilitated the use of software agents for implementing e-services; most electronic market places offer their customers virtual agents that can do their bidding (i.e., eBay, onSale). E-transactions via shopping agents constitute a promising opportunity in the e-markets (Chen, Vahidov, & Kersten, 2004). It becomes relevant what kind of information and what kinds of bargain policies are used both by agents and by the market place. There are several steps for building e-business: (1) attracting the customer, (2) knowing how they buy, (3) making transactions, (4) perfecting orders, (5) giving effective customer service, (6) offering customers recourse for problems such as breakage or returns, and (7) providing a rapid conclusion such as electronic payment. In the distributed e-market paradigm, these functions are abstracted via agents representing both contractual parts. In recent years, many researchers in intelligent agents’ domain have focused on the design of market architectures for electronic commerce (Fikes, Engelmore, Farquhar, & Pratt, 1995; Schoop & Quix, 2001; Zwass, 1999), and on protocols governing the interaction of rational agents engaged in such transactions (Hogg & Jennings, 1997; Kersten & Lai, 2005). While providing support for direct agent interaction, existing architectures for multiagent virtual markets usually lack explicit facilities for handling negotiation protocols, since they do not provide such protocols as an integrated part of the framework. In this article we will discuss the problem of contract negotiation in e-marketplaces. In the next section, we will present related models commonly used to implement negotiation in e-markets, game theory models, auction models, and contract-net protocols. Then the following section continues with the presentation of a negotiation protocol based on dependency relations. We then present a negotiation strategy based on risk evaluation. The conclusion summarizes the article and paves the further way concerning the truth in the negotiation strategy and the use of temporal aspects on commitments and executions of contracts.