An agent-based model for consumer-to-business electronic commerce

Authored by Deng-Neng Chen, B. Jeng, Wei-Po Lee, Cheng-Hung Chuang

Date Published: 2008-01

DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2006.09.020

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: .NET

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Flow charts

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Electronic commerce has changed the outlook of traditional business trading behavior. It is now common to see business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) commerce on the Internet. However, another type of model, consumer-to-business (C2B), is seldom found. A possible reason for this phenomenon is transaction cost; to unite a group of candidate buyers' common needs and preferences to buy a product or service is uneasy. Difficulties arise, for example, in how to synthesize individual's preferences into a group's consensus, how to communicate with each other within the group, and how to collectively negotiate with a seller, etc. To establish a successful business model in the electronic market, however, these processes have to be implemented. We address these issues in this paper, and propose a Buyer Collective Purchasing (BCP) model implemented in a multi-agent framework. A prototype system, which uses a laptop computer purchasing case as an example, is created to demonstrate the idea and show how the model works. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Tags

Negotiation Group decision making Intelligent agent consumer-to-business model electronic commerce