روند مذاکرات عامل مدار برای تجارت الکترونیکیB2C

B2C e-commerce is becoming more widespread as more people come to recognize its convenience and its ability to rapidly respond to requests and as more products and services become available. However, many electronic marketplaces, especially in the business-to-consumer, are in essence some kind of search engine where buyers look for the best product in a database of products offered by sellers. Usually, such e-marketplaces do not use agent technology at all although agents could significantly improve the services provided both for the buyers and the sellers. Further, negotiation capabilities are essential for B2C e-commerce systems. In an automated negotiation, intelligent agents engage in broadly similar processes to achieve the same end. In more detail, the agents prepare bids for and evaluate offers on behalf of the parties they represent with the aim of obtaining the maximum benefit for their users. Nevertheless, in the current situation, price is the only criterion by which agents are created. This factor is easy to measure and automate. However, the criteria for advanced transactions need to be elaborated, for example, details of giveback and dividend. In this paper, we present a multiple-attributes negotiation model for B2C e-commerce, which deploys intelligent agents to facilitate autonomous and automatic on-line buying and selling by intelligent agents while quickly responding to consumers. These include a 4-phase model, information collection, search, negotiation, and evaluation. We also apply fuzzy theory and analytical hierarchy process to develop the system interface to facilitate the user inputs. Finally, an example of the notebook purchasing process is illustrated.

The Internet has fundamentally changed the environment of business, because it offers sellers and buyers a powerful communication channel and makes it possible for the two parties to come together in the e-marketplaces. B2C e-commerce is becoming more widespread as more people come to recognize its convenience and its ability to offer a quick response to requests and as more products or services become available. Electronic commerce is a business practice associated with e buying and selling information, products, and services on the Internet. Electronic commerce is increasingly popular in today’s businesses (Du, Li, & Chou, 2005). There are more and more organizations paying attention to the advantage of this new tendency. So, e-commerce is now playing a more and more important role in our daily life (Anumba & Ruikar, 2002). Business-to-consumer is similar in concept to the traditional method of retailing, the main difference being the medium used to carry out business by the Internet. Such a method of carrying out business transactions assumes the consumer has access to the WWW. By selling direct to customers or reducing the number of intermediaries, companies can achieve higher profits while charging lower prices (Laudon & Laudon, 2000). The Internet offers consumers greater benefits from increased information and lower transaction costs, which includes search costs. There are more choices than in the traditional economic environment. At present, B2C e-commerce offers functions focusing on catalogue browsing, term screening and search. Customers have to spend much time searching and scanning to find products which achieve their demands. It can see although users can get a lot of information, it will take much time to filter useful information. In addition, more information does not mean higher efficiency. Although people can buy goods at home, they cannot avoid spending much time reviewing products on Internet. Negotiation in B2C commerce is also a time-consuming process because all parties desire to maximize their own payoff while they may have opposing goals. If some of the parties do not concede, it could take forever to reach an agreement (Choi, Liu, & Chen, 2001). Negotiation is an inseparable component of many e-commerce activities, such as auctions, scheduling, contracting, and so on, and is one area that can greatly benefit from automation (Serguievskaia, Al-Sakran, & Atoum, 2006). Negotiation is a very extensive subject spanning from pre-negotiation to post-negotiation analysis, both at the local and social level. Thus, a considerable amount of work on negotiation is available in the literature from different domains, such as operational research, economics, and decision theory (Wanyama & Far, 2007). Software agent technology is a new approach in e-negotiations. Use of software agents to represent the negotiating parties could greatly decrease efforts and the time needed to complete negotiations. Intelligent agent software is the action of human decision-making behavior in the form of a computer program. Intelligent agent software can help users to perform some actions involving search, negotiation, trade off and so on to improve effectiveness. It also improves the consumer’s bargaining position with the opposition from the Iternet and traditional channels. A negotiation support system (NSS) refers to a specialized group support system designed to help negotiators achieve optimal settlements (Zhu, Guan, Wang, Zhou, & Liao, 2005). Morge and Beanue (2004) present an agent-based negotiation support system having the following functionalities: Information sharing among stakeholders, Auto-negotiation between agents, and Modeling of group decision-making. Faratin, Sierra, and Jennings (2002) proposed an agent negotiation protocol which depends on utility, similar to the analytic approaches. Much effort has been spent on designing agents for automated negotiation (Li, Giampapa, & Sycara, 2003). However, traditional e-marketplaces do not use agent technology even though agents could significantly improve the services provided both for the buyers and the sellers. Moreover, prior research only focused on how to achieve maximum profit. The criteria for advanced transactions needs to elaborated, for example, details of giveback and dividend. Therefore, this paper proposes a multiple-attributes negotiation model for B2C e-commerce.

In this paper, we present a multiple-attribute negotiation model for B2C e-commerce deploying intelligent agents to facilitate autonomous and automatic on-line buying and selling while providing a fast response to consumers. The negotiation model includes a 4-phase model, information collection, search, negotiation, and evaluation. We also apply fuzzy theory and analytical hierarchy process to develop the system interface to facilitate the user inputs. In the end, an example of the notebook buying process is illustrated. The approach to enhancing this negotiation model needs to be explored in the future. One method is to improve the search procedure to make the model more effective and precise. Another possibility is to implement it in the real world and evaluate the results. Undoubtedly, the future of the agent-based negotiation process for B2C application holds great promise and potential.