An Automated Mechanism for Negotiations in E-Commerce Systems

Research in the domain of autonomous negotiation agent gains more and more attention due to industry hype and momentum regarding e-commerce and e-markets. Negotiations have been identified as an advantageous coordination mechanism for the interaction of buyers and sellers in e-market that transcend the selling of commodities or uniform goods. Therefore, support for autonomous negotiation may become a critical success factor for e-commerce systems. This paper presents the taxonomy for autonomous negotiation agents in e-commerce systems. The taxonomy allows not only for the exact characterization and comparison of a broad variety of autonomous negotiation agent designs and systems, ranging from bilateral negotiation and multilateral negotiation, but could also lead towards a more structured approach for the design of autonomous negotiations.