The future of electronic commerce will be shaped by open, heterogeneous and complex structures, consisting of networked marketplaces. Software agents will interact and negotiate on behalf of their human (or organizational) principals. Principals will be able to implement fraudulent strategies in their agents, which cannot be countered by technical security alone. In the absence of a single correctional institution, agents will have to rely on social mechanisms for assessing reliability and reputation of other, unknown agents. The multi-agent system AVALANCHE is a prototype for an agent-based secure electronic commerce marketplace environment. The reputation tracking mechanism, which is implemented in AVALANCHE’s software agents, evaluates

One scenario of the future of computation populates the Internet with vast numbers of software agents providing, trading, and using a rich variety of information goods and services in an open, freemarket economy. An essential task in such an economy is the retailing or brokering of information: gathering it from the right producers and distributing it to the right consumers. This paper investigates one crucial aspect of brokers' dynamical behavior, their price-setting mechanisms, in the context of a simple information filtering economy. We consider only the simplest cases in which a broker sets its price and product parameters based solely on the system's current state, without explicit prediction of the future. Analytical and numerical results show that the system's dynamical behavior in such "myopic" cases is generically an unending cycle of disastrous competitive "wars" in price/product space. These in turn are directly attributable to the existence of multiple peaks in th...

Agent technologies have steadily matured in moving from the research laboratory to industrial application over the last ten years. Numerous systems have been deployed or are under advanced development with strong industrial support. These systems suggest important lessons for both industry and researchers. From an industrial perspective, these examples reflect trends in both business and technology that make agents an increasingly attractive commercial tool. From a research perspective, these examples identify important gaps in agent technology that merit the attention of academicians.

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Using simulation and analysis we show that agent-based auction-cleared automated markets can be stabilized using only completely myopic agents (without value traders), if these naïve agents are provided with a price signal that reflects order-book information. This demonstrates that information in the order book is extremely valuable, that prediction can be replaced by better instantaneous information about others’ bids, and suggests new, more stable algorithms for market-based control.

entities are used during the analysis stage to conceptu- alize the system, while concrete entities are used within the design process and typically have direct counterparts in the run-time system.

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In a large-scMe multiagent system, agents that need to interact with other agents are faced with a combinatoriMly explosive number of potential interactions.

The dynamic of the consumer decision-making process in front of a shelf of similar products in a retail store is the subject of this research investigation. This process is characterized by a person deciding to choose and buy one of many similar, if not essentially identical, products all able to perform the same function. In this process, the product's packaging, brand, and price are some of the key factors affecting the consumer's decision. In order to explore this decision making process, a virtual market place for the qualitative simulation of how product awareness spreads among consumers is described. Potentially this methodology could allow the investigation of hypothetical economic mechanisms underlying tradeoff among product advertisement effort, consumers' memory span and duration, and passing word among friends in determining a product market share.

An agent based tool for analysing markets behaviour under several rate of information diffusion is described. This methodology allows for the study of tradeoffs among several variables of information like product advertisement efforts, consumers' memory span, and passing word among friends in determining market shares. Insights gained by using this approach on an hypothetical economy are reported. 1.