Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce VI : Theories for and Engineering of Distributed Mechanisms and Systems

The design of intelligent trading agents, mechanisms, and systems has received growing atttention in the agents and multiagent systems communities in an e?ort to address the increasing costs of search, transaction, and coordination which follows from the increasing number of Internet-enabled distibuted el- tronic markets. Furthermore, new technologies and supporting business models areresultinginagrowingvolumeofopenandhorizontallyintegratedmarketsfor trading of an increasingly diverse set of goods and services. However, growth of technologies for such markets requires innovative solutions to a diverseset of - isting and novel technical problems which we are only beginning to understand. Speci?cally, distributed markets present not only traditional economic pr- lems but also introduce novel and challenging computational issues that are not represented in the classic economic solution concepts. Novel to agent-mediated electronic commerce are considerations involving the computation substrates of the agents and the electronic institutions that supports trading, and also the human-agentinterface (involving issues of preference elicitation, representation, reasoning, and trust). In sum, agent-mediated electronic trade requires prin- pled design (from economics and game theory) and incorporates novel combi- tions of theories from di?erent disciplines such as computer science, operations research, arti?cial intelligence, and distributed systems. The collection of above-mentioned issues and challenges has crystallized into a new, consolidated agent research ?eld that has become a focus of attention in recent years: agent-mediated electronic commerce.