Pirasa: strategic protocol selection for e-commerce agents

We present Pirasa: an agent-based simulation environment for studying how autonomous agents can best interact with each other to exchange goods in e-commerce marketplaces. A marketplace in Pirasa enables agents to enact buyer or seller roles and select from sales, auction, and negotiation protocols to achieve the individual goals of their users. An agent’s strategy to maximize its utility in the marketplace is guided by its user’s preferences and constraints such as ‘maximum price’ and ‘deadline’, as well as an agent’s personality attributes, e.g., how ‘eager’ or ‘late’ the agent can be for exchanging goods and whether the agent is a ‘spender’ or ‘saver’ in an exchange. To guide the agent’s actions selected by a strategy, we use the notion of electronic contracts formulated as regulatory norms. In this context, we present how Pirasa is organized with regards to seller processes for goods submission, the inclusion of buyer preferences, and the management of transactions through specialized broker agents. Using randomized simulations, we demonstrate how a buyer agent can strategically select the most suitable protocol to satisfy its user’s preferences, goals and constraints in dynamically changing market settings. The generated simulation data can be leveraged by researchers to analyze agent behaviors, and develop additional strategies.