Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce

While there are many proposals to automate the buying and selling process, there has been no actual attempt to automate the tendering process (sealed auction). This chapter contributes toward the steps to move in this direction. In this chapter, the benefits of an on-line tendering system are clarified, the tendering process is analyzed, the current attempts are surveyed, the competency of EDI and on-line auctions approach is criticized, and a framework solution is proposed.

SAFER E-Commerce

As electronic commerce (e-commerce) booms, the demands for intelligent tools to streamline transactions are increasing. This motivates the development of the next generation of e-commerce, agent-based e-commerce. This chapter proposes a Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution, & Roaming (SAFER) architecture for agent-based e-commerce. SAFER provides services for agents in e-commerce and establishes a rich set of mechanisms to manage and secure them. The definitions and functions of the various components in the SAFER architecture are elaborated. This chapter also illustrates three main aspects in the SAFER architecture: agent fabrication, agent evolution, and agent roaming.

Intelligent Agents for E-Commerce

A characteristic feature of the explosive growth in electronic commerce is the rapid innovation and adoption of new technologies, which results in the creation of new business relationships between consumers, firms, and markets. One such technology that is profoundly changing the dynamics of the electronic marketplace is ‘intelligent agent’ technology. Agents have the ability to autonomously carry out various activities on behalf of their principals. At a micro-economic level, agents can help buyers and sellers achieve greater efficiencies of information exchange in the electronic business-to-consumer and business-to-business domains. Additionally, they facilitate the creation of vertically integrated portals that have a significant impact on the macroeconomic landscape. Using many real-world examples, we characterize the different roles that software agents play in the various e-commerce business models and also touch upon their impact on creation of new market structures. We address price-matching versus price-comparison agents. We highlight the various purchase decision criteria evident in various vertical markets and suggest the need for a cross-industry product (and service) attribute data representation model, based on the expanded capabilities of XML. We contrast the autonomous price comparisons enabled by agents with the expanded criteria comparisons facilitated by the e-commerce rating sites. We discuss the public policy implications of these second-generation e-commerce agents with regard to data representation standardization and consumer information privacy. We present future directions for intelligent agent functions that encompass standard representation of decision criteria such as delivery and payment options, return policies, service, quality, trust, and reputation.

Software Agents in Today's Digital Economy

One of the most discussed topics in the information systems literature today is software agent/intelligent agent technology. Software agents are high-level software abstractions with inherent capabilities for communication, decision making, control, and autonomy. They are programs that perform functions such as information gathering, information filtering, or mediation (running in the background) on behalf of a person or entity. They have several aliases such as agents, bots, chatterbots, databots, intellibots, and intelligent software agents/robots. They provide a powerful mechanism to address complex software engineering problems such as abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, reusability, concurrency, and distributed operations. Much research has been devoted to this topic, and more and more new software products billed as having intelligent agent functionality are being introduced on the market every day. The research that is being done, however, does not wholeheartedly endorse this trend. The current research into intelligent agent software technology can be divided into two main areas: technological and social. The latter area is particularly important since, in the excitement of new and emergent technology, people often forget to examine what impact the new technology will have on people’s lives. In fact, the social dimension of all technology is the driving force and most important consideration of technology itself. This chapter presents a socio-technical perspective on intelligent agents and proposes a framework based on the data lifecycle and knowledge discovery using intelligent agents. One of the key ideas of this chapter is best stated by Peter F. Drucker in Management Challenges for the 21st Century when he suggests that in this period of profound social and economic changes, managers should focus on the meaning of information, not the technology that collects it.

Agents and Payment Systems in E-Commerce

Since the 1990s, the World Wide Web has brought about innumerable changes to the ways enterprises do business. Electronic commerce is emerging as one of the most important applications on the Internet. The use of agents in e-commerce is a new research area. Agents can provide effective, fast, and cheap ways to make deals and execute transactions in cyberspace. Abstract representations of value have been developed from metal, paper notes, and bank checks to savings cards, credit cards, and now electronic forms. This chapter presents a brief survey of existing different types of payment systems and focuses on mobile agent-based computing trends in e-commerce. By combining software agent technology with cryptographic techniques, an agent-based e-payment scheme built for the SAFER e-commerce architecture is proposed, which is aimed to provide a flexible and secure financial infrastructure for Internet commerce.

Web-Based Smart Card Agent Environment and Applications for E-Commerce

Issues on usability, security, and mobility have always been the main concerns for e-commerce implementations that aim to gain widespread public acceptance. Smart Card Agent Environment is designed to address these issues by using a combination of software agent and smart card technology. In this chapter, a functional overview of the proposed environment is presented to illustrate how these two technologies can be integrated to offer e-commerce services with high usability, security, and mobility. To further demonstrate the concept, a prototype implementation of the environment has been carried out. In this implementation, an on-card agent residing in the smart card is capable of storing critical data securely, providing digital ID and signature, and carrying out user authentication. On the other hand, off-card agent would provide various high-level agent services that can be used to carry out e-commerce activities. Before the end of the chapter, practical considerations for issues on security, technology acceptance, infrastructure availability, and standardization will be discussed.

Internet Commerce and Exporting

A host of new products and services are now available to more than a half-billion consumers. Firms now have greater opportunities to customize their product/service offerings as well as rely on standardized offerings as a preference. Global firms have the opportunity to customize their advertising and sales promotion messages to specific customer segments without the significant cost once involved in developing numerous messages for numerous markets. This communication segmentation strategy allows firms to achieve real dissemination strategies because of the elimination of wasted audience coverage and better-targeted messages aimed at the core benefits sought by various consumer segments. This is the new business world created by the Internet. As a result of recent technological advances in market entry, many firms are now beginning to increase their marketing and export functions. An emerging part of new technologies development involves electronic transactions over the open network, the Internet. An important Internet characteristic is its global coverage. Using the Internet as an access to the international market, firms generate significant revenues. For example, the music CD distributor CDNow, as a pure on-line company generated 21 percent of its total revenue from international markets in the first quarter of 1998; Dell, a computer manufacturer, generated 20 percent; and FastParts, an electronic components distributor, generated 30 percent. With other numerous examples of generating international revenue on-line, the Internet has already been proven a strategic tool in the exporting process. In this chapter we examine Internet marketing strategy for exporting and possible implications for firms using electronic technologies. The first part of this chapter presents Internet commerce as a specific entry mode to global markets using advanced technologies, represented by the Internet. Part Two introduces a model for Internet exporting strategies utilizing key components in the marketing mix (i.e., product, promotion, place, and price). The focus of this model is on the interaction between Internet commerce activities and software agents, and the potential impact on the exporting process. Applying the model of Internet-based exporting strategy to businesses, Part Three develops a strategic matrix that classifies firms based on the degree of product transferability and their capitalization on Internet technologies in exporting. Particular emphasis is given to the role of software agents in the electronic exporting process at different stages in strategy development. Finally, we summarize the impact of Internet commerce on exporting activities and highlight the benefits of incorporating new technologies into an exporting strategy.

Distributed Recommender Systems

In this chapter, we introduce the concepts of recommender systems as a very successful Internet commerce tool. Then, we describe the basic principles of recommender systems and carefully analyzes how these systems relate to other prevailing data-analysis techniques and how they are more suitable for providing real-time personalized recommendations for customers of Internet commerce. The following section depicts the importance of recommender systems and their strategies for improving sales. We then analyze the nature and necessity of recommender systems in future commerce applications and establish the need for distributing such services to make them widely available. Later we present a detailed taxonomy of distributed recommender system applications and three different implementation frameworks for providing distributed recommender system services for Internet commerce, we analyze some of the design issues as well.

Supporting Electronic Commerce of Software Products through Pay-Per-Use Rental of Downloadable Tools

The pervasiveness of Internet connectivity and the wide diffusion of Java-capable browsers foster innovative techniques for software distribution. In this chapter, we propose a new model for the electronic commerce of software tools based on a pay-per-use rental policy. Pay-per-use rental of downloadable tools is the natural exploitation of Java applets that can be transferred on demand to the user’s machine and executed dynamically inside a browser. While software rental is not a new idea (Flamnia and McCandless, 1996), at present no example of a standard pay-per-use rental mechanism for downloadable software tools exists. This approach benefits from the advantages of central management of tools and zero maintenance for users typical of Java applets, together with a new way to pay for their use. Software rental presents several advantages to producers and users. Pay-per-use rental is particularly suited to Web-based applications, because they are offered to a very heterogeneous and dynamic user population (Bakos and Brynjolfson, 1997). This chapter describes advantages and issues related to pay-per-use, and explains how to add it to Web-based systems, by presenting the example of pay-per-use integration in WebMetrics, a Web-based system providing distributed collection, management, and analysis of source code metrics. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses tools-on-demand. Section 3 presents the role of pay-per-use. Section 4 introduces WebMetrics, our prototype pay-per-use application. Section 5 describes the architecture of WebMetrics. Section 6 presents a list of open issues. Section 7 draws some conclusions.

A Virtual Salesperson

This chapter describes the use of a graphical humane interface—a Virtual Salesperson. The face of the Virtual Salesperson is a generic Facial Animation Engine developed at the University of Genova in Italy and uses a 3-D computer graphics model based on the MPEG-4 standard supplemented by Cyberware scans for facial detail. The appearance of the head may be modified by Facial Definition Parameters to more accurately model the required visage allowing one model to represent many different Talking Heads. The “brain” of the Virtual Salesperson, developed at Curtin University, integrates natural language parsing, text to speech synthesis, and artificial intelligence systems to produce a “bot” capable of helping a user through a question/answer sales enquiry. The Virtual Salesperson is a specific example of a generic Human Computer Interface—a Talking Head.