Inter-agent Dialogues in Electronic Marketplaces

This paper presents an overall framework for carrying out different types of dialogues between intelligent and autonomous agents acting in an electronic marketplace. Such dialogues take place during various commercial transactions concerning requests and offers of products and services. The proposed dialogue framework has been adopted in the communication and collaboration protocols of an already implemented system, which enables buyers and sellers delegate a variety of tasks to their personal agents. Much attention has been paid to the personalization of collaborative agents, which may permanently live and interact in the market representing their owners' interests. Our overall approach builds on a modular decomposition of the agents involved, and a formal and operational modeling of the associated dialogues. Features of our framework are demonstrated through an illustrative example of dialogues deployed during interagent transactions on the establishment of a combined reservation for dinner and a movie. The main contribution of this work is that the proposed framework is capable to represent disparate dialogues taking place among agents having adopted diverse strategies for carrying out e-commerce transactions.