Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Background

2.1 Agents and Mobility
2.1.1 Features of Agents
2.1.2 Agent Communication
2.1.3 Mobile Agents
2.1.3.1 Characteristics of Mobile Agents
2.1.3.2 Overview of some Existing Mobile Agent Systems

2.2 Economics of Software Agent Enabled E-commerce
2.2.1 Stages in an E-commerce Procurement Cycle
2.2.2 Characteristics of Digital Economies
2.2.2.1 Search Costs
2.2.2.2 Price Competition
2.2.2.3 Niche Creation
2.2.2.4 First Mover Advantage
2.2.2.5 Online Promotions

3. Buyer Driven E-commerce: Pull model of Marketing
3.1 An Overview of Existing Comparison Shopping Systems
3.2 Pull Model of Marketing
3.3 Architecture of the MAgNET System
3.4 Experiments with the MAgNET System
3.5 Conclusion

4. Supplier Driven E-commerce: Push model of Marketing
4.1 Related Work
4.2 Dynamic Pricing for Time-limited Goods without Negotiation
4.2.1 The Maximum Returns Algorithm
4.3 Dynamic Pricing for Time-limited Goods with Negotiation
4.4 Implementation of a Supplier-Driven E-Marketplace
4.5 Experimental Results
4.6 Conclusion

5. Dynamic Pricing for Suppliers
5.1 Pricebots for Dynamic Online Pricing
5.2 Related Work
5.3 Adaptive Derivative Follower Strategy
5.4 Model Optimizer Algorithm
5.5 Customer Segmentation and Tiered Pricing
5.5 Experimental Results and Comparison with other Algorithms
5.6 Conclusions

6. Buyer and Supplier Interaction
6.1 Related Work
6.2 Maximizing Welfare through cooperation
6.3 Incentives for True Revelation
6.4 Effects of discontinuous Demand and Supply Curves
6.5 Conclusions

7. Security of Mobile Agent Enabled E-commerce Systems
7.1 Related Work
7.2 Malicious Agent Problem
7.3 Malicious Host Problem
7.4 The Security Architecture for MAgNET
7.5 Conclusions

8. Fault Tolerance in Mobile Agent Enabled E-commerce Systems
8.1 Related Work
8.2 Reliability Issues n MAgNET
8.3 Protocol for Recovery from Process Faults
8.4 Protocol for Recovery from Network and Node Faults
8.5 Conclusion

9. Conclusions and Future Work

Bibliography

Appendix