Design principles for long‐lived Internet agents

Abstract

Prior research on intelligent Internet agents has failed to address the needs of long-lived data-collecting agents, focusing instead on short-lived transaction agents. Transaction agents typically run for a few seconds and retrieve information for a single transaction. With the staggering growth of electronic commerce, researchers and practitioners will want to design long-lived data-collecting agents that intelligently search for, retrieve, interpret, categorize, and store vast amounts of related information each time that they run. Such agents can run over the course of days rather than seconds and can be used by practitioners for decision support applications or by researchers as part of an empirical research methodology. This paper proposes a framework for agent sophistication, and emphasizes a number of design concepts for long-lived Internet agents, including intelligence, validation, concurrency, recovery, monitoring, and interactivity. These concepts are used in the development of an illustrative tool called Electronic Data Retrieval LexicaL Agent (eDRILL), an object-oriented data-collecting agent. eDRILL is designed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and is written in Java. It gathers research data from an online auction.

Managerial Decision Making

“…Economists have modeled and estimated consumer demand and surplus in traditional markets with mathematical models and econometrics analysis. New kinds of data on the behavior of e-market participants are now more visible on the Internet, and able to be collected through the use of screen-scraping and agent-based data collection approaches [10,11,56,57], which has opened up many new opportunities for the study of electronic markets and auctions mechanisms. Sites such as uBid and eBay have been the most popular and widely used, and consequently the most studied with computational social science methods.…”

Managerial Decision Making

“…Economists have modeled and estimated consumer demand and surplus in traditional markets with mathematical models and econometrics analysis. New kinds of data on the behavior of e-market participants are now more visible on the Internet, and able to be collected through the use of screen-scraping and agent-based data collection approaches [10,11,56,57], which has opened up many new opportunities for the study of electronic markets and auctions mechanisms. Sites such as uBid and eBay have been the most popular and widely used, and consequently the most studied with computational social science methods.…”

How can virtual communities create value for business?

“…Such agents can be used to enhance research in social contracts. Internet agents used to collect information from virtual communities should follow standard ethics (Allen et al, 2006) and design principles (Kauffman et al, 2000). The data collected can then be used in design science work to develop market research tools.…”

Doing their bidding: An empirical examination of factors that affect a buyer’s utility in Internet auctions

“…(For additional details, see [18]). This agent collected data on many individuals that purchased many different items from many different sellers.…”

Managerial Decision Making

“…Economists have modeled and estimated consumer demand and surplus in traditional markets with mathematical models and econometrics analysis. New kinds of data on the behavior of e-market participants are now more visible on the Internet, and able to be collected through the use of screen-scraping and agent-based data collection approaches [10,11,56,57], which has opened up many new opportunities for the study of electronic markets and auctions mechanisms. Sites such as uBid and eBay have been the most popular and widely used, and consequently the most studied with computational social science methods.…”

How can virtual communities create value for business?

“…Such agents can be used to enhance research in social contracts. Internet agents used to collect information from virtual communities should follow standard ethics (Allen et al, 2006) and design principles (Kauffman et al, 2000). The data collected can then be used in design science work to develop market research tools.…”

Doing their bidding: An empirical examination of factors that affect a buyer’s utility in Internet auctions

“…(For additional details, see [18]). This agent collected data on many individuals that purchased many different items from many different sellers.…”

Managerial Decision Making

“…Economists have modeled and estimated consumer demand and surplus in traditional markets with mathematical models and econometrics analysis. New kinds of data on the behavior of e-market participants are now more visible on the Internet, and able to be collected through the use of screen-scraping and agent-based data collection approaches [10,11,56,57], which has opened up many new opportunities for the study of electronic markets and auctions mechanisms. Sites such as uBid and eBay have been the most popular and widely used, and consequently the most studied with computational social science methods.…”

How can virtual communities create value for business?

“…Such agents can be used to enhance research in social contracts. Internet agents used to collect information from virtual communities should follow standard ethics (Allen et al, 2006) and design principles (Kauffman et al, 2000). The data collected can then be used in design science work to develop market research tools.…”

Doing their bidding: An empirical examination of factors that affect a buyer’s utility in Internet auctions

“…(For additional details, see [18]). This agent collected data on many individuals that purchased many different items from many different sellers.…”