Research On Group Buying In Agent-mediated Electronic Marketplace

E-commerce has grown rapidly with the wide spread use of Internet. Owing to such characteristics as autonomy, reactivity, mobility, learning, cooperation etc., software agent is considered a flexible and perfect tool to be used in Internet-based on-line trading environment. So far, agent technology has been widely used in the field of E-commerce such as group buying.Group buying means that in order to obtain certain goods at a discount price, multiple consumers cooperate with each other in forming a coalition and acting as one when doing shopping. When buyers can cooperate with each other, a seller can discount the price of a goods. By using Agent technology and group buying method, great economic potential can be explored hidden in virtual community where people of similar requirements, experience and interests join together.It is important for group buying that multiple shopping agents can form a coalition. So far, a lot of research has been conducted on the establishing process of the coalition of multi-agent regarded shopping agents. However, they all have some deficiencies. First, all the research regards shopping agents as being self-interested. Secondly, in most of the research, shopping agent are considered having no ability to learn from the past experiences so that each time it wants to establish a coalition, it has to find partners from scratch. Thus, the coalition lasts only one transaction. Thirdly, some of the research doesn't consider the cost of coalition establishment and view group buying as the only choice. Finally, although some research take cost into consideration, the cost of time and communication is very high and the computation method is fairly complicated.To address the above-mentioned problems, in this paper, first a framework model of agent-mediated electronic marketplace is proposed. As in this market, communication and interaction among agents are so frequent and the market changes so quickly that we consider using polyadic π -calculus to formalize the market.Then based on the model, Q-learning is introduced in shopping agents to help them select appropriate shopping method when shopping so as to minimize the cost of shopping. Reference group is introduced as the mechanism for setting up a coalition so as to minimize the cost of communication and time. The mechanism is explained for shopping agents to establishing,...