Multi-Agent Systems & E- Commerce Martin Beer, School of Computing & Management Sciences, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom

Agents for e-Commerce Agents for eCommerce – e-Commerce –Consumer's buying behavior –Agents as mediators in eCommerce – Information economy

3 Electronic commerce Components interactive business and financial transaction electronic cataloguing electronic order tracking services automatic billing and payment services electronic funds transfer vendor registration and electronic "brand naming" automatic ordering, contracting and procurement data mining of consumer information for customer profiling advertising of products and customization of advertisements

Transactionsbusiness-to-business business-to-consumer consumer-to-consumer Difficulties of e-Commerce The Web has a number of features that limits its use as an "information market" Problems related to using the Web for eCommerce: Trust Privacy and security Billing Reliability 4

Marketing Consumer's Buying Behavior (CBB) research - a number of models of the consumer's behavior Most common stages; a simplification; some stages may overlap CBB - Guttman e.a., 1998  Need investigation  Product brokering  Merchant brokering  Negotiation  Purchase and delivery  Product service and evaluation 5 Consumer's buying behavior

1.3 Agents as mediators in eCommerce 1.3 Agents as mediators in eCommerce Most appropriate for mediating behaviors involving information filtering and retrieval, personalized evaluation, complex coordination and negotiation Persona Bargain Auction Fish Logic Firefly Finder Jango Kasbah Bot Market Need identification Product brokering Merchant brokering Negotiation Purchase and delivery Product service 6

(a) Comparison shopping agents  Search online shops to find products, merchants and best deals Product brokering guides the consumers through a large product feature space allows shoppers to specify constraints on a product and scores the products CSP engine: hard constraints and soft constraints 7 Persona Logic

helps consumers find products uses "word of mouth" recommendations ACF = Automated Collaborative Filtering identifies the shopper's "nearest neighbours" and offers products highly rated by them Merchant brokering the first agent for price comparison given a specific product, the agent requests its price from each of nine different merchant Web sites using the same http request as a Web browser Problem: some merchants block access to their prices; other merchants volunteer their prices 8 BargainFinderFirefly

helps users decide what to buy finds specifications and product reviews makes recommendations to the user performs comparison shopping for the best buy monitors "what's new" lists, watches for special offers Problem = Web pages are different; exploits:  Navigation regularities  Corporate regularities  Vertical separation has 2 key components:  a component to learn vendor description  a comparison shopping component Solves the merchant blocking issue by having the product requests originating from each consumer's Web browser instead of a centralised site as in BargainFinder  appear as requests from real customers 9 Jango

Product brokering and merchant brokering agents use information filtering techniques content-based filtering, e.g. associative networks of keywords as in Jango constraint-based filtering, like in PersonaLogic, collaborative-based filtering, like in Firefly 10

(b) Auction bots  Agents that can organize and/or participate in online auctions for goods Aim = develop a Web-based system in which users can create their own agents to buy and sell goods on their behalf User options:  Create a new buying agent  Create a new selling agent  See currently active agents  Create a new finding agent  Browse the marketplace for active agents 11 Kasbah

Selling agent parameters set by the user: - desired date to sell the good - desired price to sell the good - minimum price to sell at - "decay" function of the price over time to determine the current offer price anxious - linear function cool headed - quadratic function frugal - exponential function Buying agent parameters set by the user - date to buy the item by - desired price - maximum price - "growth" function of price over time 12

Kasbah agents operate in a marketplace The marketplace manages a number of ongoing auctions matching requests for goods with offers Negotiation protocol - buying agents offer bids to sellers - selling agents respond with yes or no User agents negotiate across multiple attributes of a transaction, e.g., warranty length and options, shipping time and cost, service contract, return policy, quantity, accessories, credit options, payment options Agents quantify those aspects using a multi-attribute utility function 13 Tête-à-tête

A virtual institutions corresponding to a traditional fish market which exists in Blanes (Girona) a small fishermen's village in Spain 14 Fishmarket BA Auct BM SM SA Buyer's register Credits and goods delivery Goods' register Sellers' settlements Goods show and auction 5 basic scenes BA = buyer's admitter SA = seller's admitter BM =buyer's manager SM = seller's manager Auct = auctioner

tMarket operation (simplified) 1. Open auction and register sellers (SA) 2. Collect products from sellers (SM) 3. Collect buyers (BA) 4. Present products at price w ( Auct) 5. if silence then decrease w go to 4 6. if first bid w'  w then adjudicate product 8. Verify credit (BM) go to 8 9. if not solvable (BM) 7. if two equal bids then fine or expell then increase w increase w to x * w' go to else sell product update buyer's credit (BM) update seller's credit (SM) 15

l The first valid offer is the one to win the round l An offer is valid if the bidder has enough credit to pay for that bid l Fishmarket was also tested for closed bid auctions and Vickrey auctions l Does not automate negotiation Problems with auction bots Main difficulty - trust if: the agent really understands what the user wants the agent is not going to be exploited by other agent the agent does not end up with a poor agreement 16

1.4 Information economy University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) is structured as a collection of agents that can buy and sell services from each other Treating a library as an information economy provides a framework for making decentralised decisions about allocation of limited information goods and services available The services and protocols offered by UMDL infrastructure are called SMS = Service Market Society 17

Service Market Society The Service Market Society implements a multi-agent information economy where agents buy and sell services from each other. 18 UIASCAAMAQPACIARegistryAuctionQPA Bid phase Query phase Find phase Query Label Match me with a seller at a price Match me with a buyer at a price Info resources

Ontology of services SCA classifies the service description into a sub- sumption-based taxonomy  SCA matches requests for services to "semantically close" descriptions Auction specification otype of good otiming requirements oterms - per-query or subscription (how is bundled) - topic, audience - redistribute or read-only (terms) - individual or library or group (to whom is sold) ohow often the auction is cleared oprice determination rule owhat info is publically available 19

QPAs bid their marginal cost = what it would cost them to provide another unit of the product Cost(query) = A * load 2 + B * load MarginalCost(query) = 2 * A * load + B The Auction matches current lowest price seller with a buyer if the buyer's bid is above that price Once a transaction occurs, both buyers and sellers are removed from the active list and the QPA recomputes its marginal cost based on having an additional query to process Then QPA submits a new, higher sell offer to the auction 20

References M. Wooldrige. An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems, John Wiley&Sons, 2002, Ch.11, p R. Guttman, A. Mokas, P. Maes. Agents as mediators in electronic commerce. In Intelligent Information Agents, M. Klush (Ed.), Springer Verlag 1999, p P. Noriega, C. Sierra. Auctions and multi-agent systems. In Intelligent Information Agents, M. Klush (Ed.), Springer Verlag 1999, p E. Durfee, e.a.. Strategic reasoning and adaptation in an information economy. In Intelligent Information Agents, M. Klush (Ed.), Springer Verlag 1999, p W. Brenner, R. Zarnekov, H. Witting. Intelligent Software Agents, Springer Verlag, 1998, Ch.6, p

Agent systems references BargainFinder - part of "Smart Store Virtual" by Anderson Consulting Jango - Netbot Inc., Seattle, USA PersonaLogic - Reordan, Soresen, 1995 Software Agents Group, MIT Media Lab Kasbah - project of MIT Media Lab, Chaves, Maes, 1996 Tête-à-Tête - Guttman, Maes, 1998 Firefly - Shardanand, Maes, 1995 Firefly Networks (does not exist any more) AgentBuilder Auction Agents for the Electric Power Industry Fishmarket - Noriega, Sierra, 1997 UMDL - University of Michigan, Durfee e.a., 1997 InfoSleuth Retsina 22