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Designing intelligent sales-agent for online selling

Published: 15 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Online purchase from e-stores is getting popular as the prevalence of electronic commerce. At current stage, most e-stores resemble vending machines rather than real stores because they lack clerks to persuade prospects into buying products and to bargain with the customers for making a good deal. This research designs an easy-to-use and autonomous sales-agent to act as a virtual clerk in an e-store, and then investigates whether an e-store with this virtual clerk could increase customers' product evaluation and seller's surplus. This research starts with proposing a new approach to enable the intelligent sales-agent, named Isa, to dynamically adopt different persuasion and negotiation strategies according to different characteristics of human buyers. Additionally, the agent can learn to execute beneficial strategies by itself without seller's instructions. A field experiment was conducted to assess this agent. The experimental results reveal that Isa can autonomously persuade buyers into increasing their product evaluation and willingness to pay more money for product. Isa can also improve sellers' surplus and buyers' satisfaction with e-store.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '05: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Electronic commerce
August 2005
957 pages
ISBN:1595931120
DOI:10.1145/1089551
  • Conference Chairs:
  • Qi Li,
  • Ting-Peng Liang
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 August 2005

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Author Tags

  1. abstract argumentation framework
  2. negotiation
  3. persuasion
  4. reinforcement learning
  5. sales-agent

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