Electronic Commerce, as a gamut of activities involving electronic transactions performed over a network via software that may be more or less autonomous, is an emerging reality. Strategic studies have shown that electronic commerce is a major growth industry.The book is devoted to the challenges and opportunities that electronic commerce opens for agent technology. For some time, electronic commerce has attracted the avid attention of agent-builders and agent technology researchers, and these have decisively contributed to advancing the state of the art in the field. The second-generation software agents now entering the scene hold great promise for the further advancement of electronic commerce. This book originates from a workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Trading held at Agents'98 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 1998. The eleven carefully reviewed and revised papers present a unique survey of software agents in the context of electronic commerce.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Building Electronic Marketplaces with the ZEUS Agent Tool-Kit.- Accounting for Cognitive Costs in On-line Auction Design.- SICS MarketSpace - An Agent-Based Market Infrastructure.- Sequencing of Contract Types for Anytime Task Reallocation.- Agent-Mediated Integrative Negotiation for Retail Electronic Commerce.- A Multi-agent System for Coordinating International Shipping.- Bid Evaluation and Selection in the MAGNET Automated Contracting System.- Evolutionary Computing and Negotiating Agents.- Bidding Strategies for Trading Agents in Auction-Based Tournaments.- A ?-calculus Model of a Spanish Fish Market - Preliminary Report -.- Information Integration for Electronic Commerce.