This paper provides a definition of automated negotiation within electronic commerce. It outlines two barriers to automated negotiation, the ontology issue and the strategy problem. State of the art overviews are given of automated negotiation, specifically Negotiation Support Systems, intelligent agents, the auction mechanism, and online marketspaces. Both academic research and currently functional systems are covered, and several World Wide Web addresses are given for readers who wish to investigate further on their own. 1 1 While every attempt is made to provide current URL locations, the Web changes more quickly than print media can ever capture. Hence, some of the URLs may not be current or correct by the time this article appears. We will try to keep our Negotiation Project web site, http://haas.berkeley.edu/~citm/nego-proj.html, current with respect to these addresses. 2 1.

Procurement is one of the most important business functions, and it affects project expenses and quality of the final product. Information technology, specifically the World Wide Web and the Internet, have the potential to radically change the way procurement is done. Electronic catalogs, EDI, EFT, and integrated databases will replace traditional telephone and paper catalog-based procurement techniques. This paper provides a brief overview of emerging procurement technologies, and presents the results from a field study. The field study gives a state-of-the-practice view of how actual companies are using technology to help procurement, including a "leaders" section which profiles companies which seem to use the new technology more than the rest of the sample. Keywords: electronic commerce, Internet, World Wide Web, procurement, purchasing. 1 Introduction Procurement is one of the most important functions for both governmental and private sector business processes. It affects not on...