A cooperative exchanging mechanism among seller agents for group-based sales

摘要

Agent-mediated electronic markets have been a growing area in intelligent agent research and development in recent years. Agents can act autonomously and cooperatively in an electronic market on behalf of their users. In such an electronic market, if a seller agent does not have enough of a particular item, it misses the opportunity to sell the item. Buyers also miss the opportunity to purchase the item. Namely, the overall negotiation utility is decreased. Thus, we propose a new cooperation mechanism among seller agents based on exchanging their goods in our agent-mediated electronic market system, G-Commerce. In G-Commerce, seller agents and buyer agents negotiate with each other. In our model, seller agents cooperatively negotiate in order to sell goods in stock. Buyer agents cooperatively form coalitions in order to buy goods based on discount prices. Seller agents’ negotiations are completed by using an exchanging mechanism for selling goods. Our experiments show that this exchanging mechanism enables seller agents to sell goods in stock effectively. We also demonstrate how our exchanging mechanism satisfies Pareto optimality.