Supporting Electronic Negotiation for Intelligent Trading

Intelligent negotiation agents are software agents, which can negotiate the terms of transactions on behalf of purchasers and vendors on the Internet. Current solutions are mostly limited to single attribute negotiations, and are typically used to determine price. Moreover they typically assume information to be precisely defined and shared between the parties. Bargaining situations are, in most cases, characterized by conflicting interests among the agents that don’t cater for common interests and possibility for collaboration to improve the outcomes of the parties. Another limitation of existing on-line negotiation agents is that their negotiation is usually taking place in a centralized marketplace where the agents meet and negotiate following a set of protocols that don’t cater for more open and direct party-to-party negotiations. This chapter reports on solutions for addressing the issues of negotiations with incomplete and imprecise information, dynamic coalition formation and negotiation ontologies. The negotiation with incomplete and imprecise information uses fuzzy constraint-based reasoning and the principle of utility theory. The formation of coalition is based on negotiation over the distribution of the coalition value and the agent level of resources. The negotiation ontologies make use of shared ontologies as well as individual ontologies to avoid misunderstanding and make data exchange meaningful.

E-Capital Budgeting

Over the last five years, firms with strong presence on the Internet have seen increases in the value of their firms to what some consider obscene levels. The “new era” economy has led to “irrational exuberance” in the stock market. This era of uncertainty has also unleashed numerous valuable opportunities for firms. The world in general and e-commerce ventures in particular are dominated by strategic investments with lots of uncertainty that require huge capital outlays. Moreover, these projects must have the ability to adapt to changing conditions that evolve as new information becomes available. The failure of traditional discounted cash flows (DCF), such as NPV, in valuing e-commerce projects is partially due to meager cash flows relative to required investments and high discount rate due to unknown risk in the projects. This chapter will show how techniques used in valuing financial options can be used to value project or firms under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

E-Commerce in the Financial Services Industry

The financial services industry consists of retail financial services such as retail banking, consumer lending and mortgage banking, insurance (life, health, property) and financial markets. Each of these sectors has seen tremendous growth in the services and products delivered over public internetworks such as the Internet. The recent signing into law (November 1999) of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in the U.S. has enabled firms such as retail banks to provide an unprecedented array of financial services. As competition within the industry increases, firms of all sizes are looking to achieve competitive advantage through Electronic Commerce (EC). According to a recent study by the Securities Industry Association and the TowerGroup, securities firms in North America spent $3.9 billion on Internet-related information technology (21% of their total IT spending) in 1998, and this is expected to double by 2002 (SIA, 1999).

Digital Asset Management

In this chapter, we examine Digital Asset Management concepts, detail the desirable features and components of DAM, the taxonomy of the DAM systems, the e-commerce aspects of digital assets and discuss the various open research issues associated with Digital Asset Management.

Towards a Methodology for the Development of Web-Based Systems

E-commerce is changing the nature of business. To support ‘buying and selling over digital media’ for private and corporate Web users, companies need not only appropriate transaction systems, but also new information systems. While the systems development challenge for transaction systems is mostly restricted to separating access channel functionality from business transactions processing and developing systems support for new access channels, systems development needs for information systems are much more challenging since different media and different information source systems have to be integrated, novel forms navigation has to be supported and information objects become more complex and more volatile.

E-Commerce Software

Early information systems were mainly built around secondary, administrative processes of the value chain (e.g., accounting). But since the Internet came into use, more and more primary processes have become accessible to automation: customer acquisition, ordering, billing and, in the case of intangible goods such as software, even delivery. To facilitate this complex task, we suggest that the relevant parts of the enterprise be modeled according to the MEMO (Multi-perspective Enterprise MOdeling) method. It allows for the description of an enterprise on three levels-strategy, organization and information system-and from four angles-process, structure, resources and goals. All partial models for the views are integrated via a common object-oriented core. In this framework we suggest a modeling language for the IS layer, the Event-driven Method Chain (EMC), a process-oriented language based on Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs), which we adapt to fit both the MEMO framework and the object-oriented paradigm, thus making it suitable for the development of Web-based applications in an object-oriented programming language. To illustrate this we use the example of a software trading company.

Strategies for Bricks to Beat Clicks - How Established Business Can Incorporate the New Technologies

This chapter looks at models for organizational development using the potential of virtual organization for established firms. For established businesses, particularly those in the consumer product area, much cash and knowledge is invested in the management of multiple physical outlets–bricks. The potential for the inexpensive and pervasive Internet technologies to reinvent the mail order shopping with a real-time interaction attraction has been widely touted and is under test. For books, music and perhaps even groceries, it is possible that the old measurement of value–“location, location, location” may be replaced with clicks of the mouse.

Cyber Shopping and Privacy

At times, privacy issues are perceived as a part of security issues, therefore, let us differentiate them. Security refers to the integrity of the data storage, processing and transmitting system and includes concerns about the reliability of hardware and software, the protection against intrusion or infiltration by unauthorized users. Privacy, on the other hand, refers to controlling the dissemination and use of data, including information that is knowingly or unknowingly disclosed. Privacy could also be the by-product of the information technologies themselves (Cate, 1997). Over the past decade, numerous surveys conducted around the world have found consistently high levels of concern about privacy. Many studies (Dorney, 1997; Allard, 1998; Harris and Westin, 1999) found that more than 80% of Net users are concerned about threats to their privacy while online. The Federal Trade Commission discovered (Privacy online: A report to Congress/Federal Trade Commission, United States, Federal Trade Commission, 1998) that many Web sites collect personal information and release the same without the users’ knowledge and permission. There are methods (Adam et al., 1996; Verton, 2000; Wen, 2001; McGuire, 2000; Feghhi, 1999) that make cyber shopping secure, although consumers may still have concerns about security aspects of cyber shopping. How can one keep information about his/her Internet browsing habits to oneself? It’s a challenge in this era of technological advancements. In this chapter, we focus exclusively on privacy issues that arise in cyber shopping. In the recent past, many articles on privacy have appeared in journals. In this chapter, we review these publications on privacy.

Electronic Payment Systems

The advantages of electronic trading are numerous, with benefits for both users and merchants. However for electronic trading to reach its full potential, factors such as ease of use and improving customer confidence will have to be addressed in relation to many aspects of electronic business. Indeed an important stumbling block for widespread adoption of electronic trading, from a convenience perspective, is the ability to complete transactions electronically at payment and delivery stages. The delivery stage is dependent on the type of product or service, but electronic payments are possible even if many payment options are not widely used. Conventional payment instruments are not well equipped for the speed and cost effectiveness required by electronic commerce. The marketing ploy of the Internet is its ease of use and convenience. Many therefore deem it unacceptable that customers have to utilize conventional payment mechanisms due either to the complexity of existing payment systems or the customer’s fear of conducting financial payments electronically.

Delivery and Tracking of Rotating Banner Advertisements on the World Wide Web

In this chapter we propose a framework for the delivery and tracking of rotating banner advertisements on the World Wide Web (WWW). The proposed conceptual framework attempts to improve upon traditional approaches by utilizing both client and server resources. In addition to being able to track clicks, it allows for other non-traditional measures like exposure time and opportunities to see.