Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce

In the last few years we have witnessed a surge of business-toconsumer and business-to-business commerce operated on the Internet. However many of these systems are often nothing more than electronic catalogues on which the user can choose a product which is made available for a fixed price. This modus operandi is clearly failing to exploit the full potential of electronic commerce. Against this background, we argue here that in the next few years we will see a new generation of systems emerge, based on automatic negotiation. In this paper we identify the main parameters on which any automatic negotiation depends. This classification schema is then used to categorise the subsequent papers in this book that focus on automatic negotiation.