Agent-mediated electronic commerce: Issues, challenges and some viewpoints

Electronic commerce is set to be a major application area of agent technology, yet it is not very clear from our published agents literature what the core research issues that we need to address in this area are. In this paper, we examine this important domain of agent-mediated electronic commerce highlighting in particular some its key issues and challenges. It strongly takes the view that a research area is defined by its problems, not its methods, and hence we try and tease out some of the problems/sub-problems that define agent-mediated electronic commerce. We present them as a list of open questions. Next, the authors propound their viewpoints on these questions in the hope that it stimulates and influences the research that need to be carried out in order to realize truly useable, agent-mediated or agent-enhanced electronic commerce. This paper is a part summary of the views propounded by some of the panelists at a panel session on agent-mediated electronic commerce at the 2^nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents held in Minneapolis, May 1998.