Market mechanisms, such as auctions, will likely represent a common interaction medium for agents on the Internet. The Michigan Internet AuctionBot is a flexible, scalable, and robust auction server that supports both software and human agents. The server manages many simultaneous auctions by separating the interface from the core auction procedures. This design provides a responsive interface and tolerates system and network disruptions, but necessitates careful timekeeping procedures to ensure temporal accuracy. The AuctionBot has been used extensively in classroom exercises, and is available to the general Internet population. Its flexible specification of auctions in terms of orthogonal parameters makes it a useful device for agent researchers exploring the design space of auction mechanisms.

action costs, leading to more efficient, "friction-free" markets. Table 1. Functions of a market Internet Economics Matching buyers and sellers . Determination of product offerings - Product features offered by sellers - Aggregation of different products . Search (of buyers for sellers and of sellers for buyers) - Price and product information - Matching seller offerings with buyer preferences . Price discovery - Process and outcome in determination of prices Facilitation of transactions . Logistics - Delivery of information, good, or service to buyer . Settlement - Transfer of payment to seller . Trust - Credit system, reputations, rating agencies like Consumer Reports and Better Business Bureaus Institutional infrastucture . Legal - Commercial code, contract law, dispute resolution, intellectual property protection . Regulatory - Rules and regulations, monitoring, enforcement produ

In the last few years we have witnessed a surge of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce operated on the Internet. However, most current electronic commerce systems are little more than electronic catalogues that allow a user to purchase a product under predetermined and inflexible terms and conditions. We believe that in the next few years we will see a new generation of electronic commerce systems emerge, based on automated negotiation. In this paper, we identify the main parameters on which any automated negotiation depends. To show the applicability of our classification framework, we use it to categorise a representative sample of some of the most prominent negotiation models that exist in the literature.

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Abstract—This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The roles of agents in B2B e-commerce are discussed through the business-to-business transaction model that identifies agents as being employed in partnership formation, brokering, and negotiation. Having identified the roles for agents in B2C and B2B e-commerce, some of the key underpinning technologies of this vision are highlighted. Finally, we conclude by discussing the future directions and potential impediments to the wide-scale adoption of agent-mediated e-commerce. Index Terms—Agent-mediated electronic commerce, intelligent agents. 1

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e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid. 1.

Electronic commerce technology o ers the opportunity tointegrate and optimize the global production and distribution supply chain. The computers of the various corporations, located throughout the world, will communicate with each other to determine the availability of components, to place and con rm orders, and to negotiate delivery timescales. In this paper we describe MAgNET, a system for networked electronic trading, that is based on the Java mobile agent technology, called aglets. Aglets are dispatched by the buyer to the various suppliers, where they negotiate orders and deliveries, returning to the buyer with their best deals for approval. MAgNET handles the deep supply chain, where a supplier may need to contact further suppliers of subcomponents in order to respond to an enquiry. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using the Java aglet technology for electronic commerce.

We are interested in supporting multi-agent contracting, in which customer agents solicit the resources and capabilities of other, self-interested agents in order to accomplish their goals. Goals may

To investigate the various research questions concerning e-negotiations, an appropriate software infrastructure is needed. As part of our project on electronic marketplaces, we have developed the Generic Experimentation Engine (GEE). GEE supports game-oriented experimentation and allows for the study of human behavior under various game situations. The more recent Generic Negotiation Platform (GNP) is a more focused version of GEE that will support experimentation with alternative market designs and with various types of negotiations. GNP is being re-engineered from GEE in that important concepts and technologies developed for GEE are carried over into GNP. The paper provides a detailed overview of GEE. The re-engineering of GEE into GNP is addressed by presenting a list of lessons learned from the GEE development and by providing a vision for GNP. Furthermore, the paper addresses the formalization of auction rules, one of the prerequisites for making GNP truly generic. 1 Int...