Designing decision-making agents for electronic markets

随着电子商务在当今社会中的作用越来越大，智能计算机系统(代理)正被要求在购买、销售和交易商品、服务和信息的电子市场中代表用户做出决定。这样的决策需要对用户偏好的详细了解；因此，有效和准确地了解用户偏好并在不完全信息下进行推理的方法是这项工作的关键组成部分。在代理与其他代理谈判或与其他代理竞争的情况下(代表其他用户行事)，额外的考虑包括设计有效的谈判策略以及对对手的偏好和目标进行建模的能力。

With the increased role of electronic commerce in today's society, intelligent computer systems (agents) are being called upon to make decisions on a user's behalf in electronic markets where goods, services and information are purchased, sold and traded. Such decision making requires detailed knowledge of the user's preferences; therefore, efficient and accurate methods for learning about the user's preferences and for reasoning with incomplete information are critical components of this work. In the case of settings where an agent is negotiating with or competing against other agents (acting on the behalf of other users), additional concerns include the design of effective negotiation strategies and the ability to model the opponent's preferences and goals.