Negotiation in electronic commerce: A study in the Latin-American market

Abstract

A number of research efforts were devoted to deploying agent technology applications in the field of Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. On the one hand, there are applications that simplify electronic transactions such as intelligent search engines and browsers, learning agents, recommender agent systems and agents that share knowledge. Thanks to the development and availability of agent software, e-commerce can use more than only telecommunications and online data processing. On the other hand, there are applications that include negotiation as part of their core activities such as the information systems field with negotiation support systems; multi-agent systems field with searching, trading and negotiation agents; and market design field with electronic auctions. Although negotiation is an important business activity, it has not been studied extensively either in traditional business or in e-commerce context. This paper introduces the idea of developing an agent with negotiation capabilities applied to the Latin American market, where both the technological gap and an inappropriate approach to motivate electronic transactions are important factors. We address these issues by presenting a negotiation strategy that allows the interaction between an intelligent agent and consumers with Latin American idiosyncrasy. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.