Evaluating Negotiation Protocols and Negotiation Strategies for Automated E-Commerce Aakanksha Gupta BRCM College of Engineering and Technology, Bahal Durgesh Kumar Srivastava Assistant Professor, BRCM College of Engineering and Technology, Bahal Saket Jain Senior Engineer, Business Support System Ericsson Global Pvt. Ltd, Gurgaon Abstract--Online or E-Shopping requires a great effort of investigation to find the best deal. Although immense information is available on World Wide Web to make smart decision in shopping, however for analyzing, comparing, and making purchase decision in e-business transaction, humans are required. Most of the developed E-Commerce businesses are still based on human intelligence. To save this investigation cum effort time, we can automate this task using some software agents which will automate this e-commerce shopping. Not just automation, we can also put the negotiation capabilities into the software agent which can help us to get the best available deal. Software agents help to automate the process of buying and selling goods and services in E-Market. To enhance the shopping process agents are the useful tools and acts as a channel between traditional market and automated E-market. This paper presents usage of negotiation protocols and intelligent agent negotiation strategies which have been mentioned in literature, responsible for price negotiation. The conclusion here is to work in automating e- commerce transaction(s) using improved negotiation strategies to enhance the experience of e-business by reducing the human effort. Keywords-- E-Commerce, Software Agent, Multi-Agent System, Negotiation I. INTRODUCTION Electronic transactions (e-business) and human computer interaction have grown to a larger extent over the last few decenniums. Internet is becoming highly eminent for providing people with almost all services related to their business, which is now becoming unmanageable without E-commerce. With online shopping, day to day life has become more convenient. E-shopping is growing in an exponential manner however it is not automated and at almost all stages of e-shopping, the buyer and seller processing, humans are involved. A human buyer is responsible for collecting all information about the products from different available sellers and websites, comparing and analyzing them, searching the best product among all, sending the purchase order and finally performing E-payment, all these stages need human intervention, today the business websites are heavily loaded with information, so a customer has to go from that flood of information and choose the product which waste a lot of time. This drawback opens up totally new direction of research and development which basically deals with automating the whole E-commerce. The best way of doing so is to employ a “Software Agent” who can do the whole task which reduces the buyer’s and seller’s time which they spend in negotiating with each other, so focus of this paper is on negotiation phase. It explores agent based automated price negotiation protocols and agent strategies of negotiating price over time that have reported in literature and gives an idea of combining these two in a system which helps to automate e-commerce transactions. II. SOFTWARE AGENT AND MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM Agent is a piece of software which is implemented to achieve a goal. A software agent is a computer program that acts for a user, however this is not just a program, an agent is a system in an environment which sense that environment and react accordingly. Software agents are different from traditional software programs as these are personalized, continuously running and designed to be autonomous in the quest of their goal. These qualities make the agent a powerful tool for designing the complex and distributed business applications in E-commerce. [1] Use of software agents for/in e-commerce was identified long back but not much of work has been done in this area. Some experiments were conducted in MIT Media Labs [4] [6] [7] and more by Chmiel, Czech, Paprzycki, Ghanza [8]. Software agents are capable in interacting with other software agents and working together to carry out task for which they are designed. In this way many software agents together form a multi-agent system. In a multi-agent system, the agents can be compared similar to humans, robots and human teams. Multi-agent system can contain a combination of both human and automated agent teams. [2] An agent can be defined as a software entity comprising of some goals, actions, and domain knowledge, situated in an environment. The way it responds is called its “behavior”. The agent validates the information it receives and creates the most effective plan to meet its goals and perform its function within a business process. [3] Researches have already proved and often claimed that software agents are most promising as well as efficient technology. III. CONSUMER BUYING BEHAVIOR MODEL The commerce moved to internet and became e-commerce but still based on a common model which focuses on the decisions and actions involved in purchasing and using goods and services. However, the model is Consumer International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) ISSN: 2278-0181 http://www.ijert.org IJERTV5IS070423 (This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.) Published by : Vol. 5 Issue 07, July-2016 www.ijert.org 502