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Market-based recommendation: Agents that compete for consumer attention

Published: 01 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The amount of attention space available for recommending suppliers to consumers on e-commerce sites is typically limited. We present a competitive distributed recommendation mechanism based on adaptive software agents for efficiently allocating the "consumer attention space," or banners. In the example of an electronic shopping mall, the task is delegated to the individual shops, each of which evaluates the information that is available about the consumer and his or her interests (e.g. keywords, product queries, and available parts of a profile). Shops make a monetary bid in an auction where a limited amount of "consumer attention space" for the arriving consumer is sold. Each shop is represented by a software agent that bids for each consumer. This allows shops to rapidly adapt their bidding strategy to focus on consumers interested in their offerings.
For various basic and simple models for on-line consumers, shops, and profiles, we demonstrate the feasibility of our system by evolutionary simulations as in the field of agent-based computational economics (ACE). We also develop adaptive software agents that learn bidding-strategies, based on neural networks and strategy exploration heuristics. Furthermore, we address the commercial and technological advantages of this distributed market-based approach. The mechanism we describe is not limited to the example of the electronic shopping mall, but can easily be extended to other domains.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 4, Issue 4
November 2004
108 pages
ISSN:1533-5399
EISSN:1557-6051
DOI:10.1145/1031114
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 November 2004
Published in TOIT Volume 4, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. ACE
  2. agent-based computational economics
  3. competitive multi-agent systems
  4. electronic markets
  5. learning agents
  6. market-based programming
  7. recommendation systems

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  • (2016)A distributed and multi-tiered software architecture for assessing e-Commerce recommendationsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.379828:18(4507-4531)Online publication date: 25-Dec-2016
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