A Bidders Cooperation Support System for Agent-Based Electronic Commerce

Abstract

Internet is becoming an increasingly prosperous network for many types of commerce. Internet Auctions represent a particularly effective form of electronic commerce and have become a promising field for applying agent technologies. In many existing auction sites, some sellers deal in the same sort of goods or their imitations. Buyers bid for each item on sale. Buyers cannot always purchase goods at the lowest price because buyers compete, that is they do not cooperate with each other. Thus, buyers need to search hard to find items they can purchase. In this paper, we propose a bidders support system based on a mediated agent for auctions on the Internet. In our system, buyers can purchase goods at the lowest price by working in cooperation with each other. Each buyer selects an item based on his/her multi-attribute preferences. A mediated agent calculates the buyers’ utilities, and determines the successful bidders. We consider an assumption of linear utility based on multi-attribute utility theory. The advantages of the bidder cooperation support system are as follows. (1) Each buyer can purchase an item at the lowest price. (2) The buyer’s multi-attribute utilities are reflected. (3) The mechanism is robustness for buyer’s anticipating. We conducted an experiment to investigate and compare buyers’ utilities between existing auctions and our system. Our experiment shows that buyers utilities in our system are sufficiently higher than these in existing auctions.