Business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B EC) is a new way of trading on the increasingly popular computer network, Internet, and it has rapidly become a major player in the business market. B2B EC helps buyers and sellers reduce business costs an ...
Business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B EC) is a new way of trading on the increasingly popular computer network, Internet, and it has rapidly become a major player in the business market. B2B EC helps buyers and sellers reduce business costs and it enables the customized delivery of goods and services. As B2B EC emerges as one of the most important EC areas, electronic negotiation is becoming an important research subject.
Negotiation is a process of reaching an agreement on the terms of a transaction, including price or quantity, for two or more parties. It tries to reach a deal to maximize the benefits for all parties concerned. Human-based negotiation, however, could be an expensive and non-optimal method, even though beneficial to the participants, due to its potential in trying to yield the best results.
Human-based negotiation has several shortcomings. More time may be needed to reach a consensus, if some of the human parties involved do not concede in order to maximize their own benefits/goals. It could be difficult for novice negotiators to mimic experts who have skillful negotiation tactics. Therefore, automated negotiation is particularly useful in an e-commerce environment.
The negotiation process is competitive and in general, is totally independent of negotiation counterparts. Thus, choosing agent technology is appropriate for an automatic electronic negotiation platform, since autonomous software agents strive for the best deal on behalf of the human participants. In addition, mobile agents strive to become a key concept in the distribution of information.
In order to achieve the best results, a negotiation agent needs a clear-cut definition of what capabilities it can provide-negotiation models or strategies. Currently, there are several types of negotiation models for automated bargaining and many researchers have designed systems using the models. Nevertheless, most bargaining systems embody nearly one negotiation model. In this research, I present negotiation architecture that allows agents to dynamically embed a favorite negotiation strategy which can be preinstalled as a component in the system.
The MANS/RANS has a mobile agent system framework that allows agents to travel from one server to another on the network and it allows buyer agents to negotiate autonomously and automatically with seller agents regarding offers. It mainly focuses on using mobile agents for negotiations in an e-marketplace and integrating negotiation capabilities??in particular, components that implement negotiation strategies??into the mobile agents. That is, the MANS/RANS has a mechanism, which enables negotiating agents to combine pluggable strategy components.
This research describes a set of similarities and differences between the MANS/RANS framework and a popular mobile agent system, Nomad, which was integrated with either eAuctionHouse or eMediator.4, 5 The benefits of using the MANS/RANS, especially the benefits of improving buyers? and sellers? satisfaction while preserving the system?s performance, will be explained.