On the formulation of competitive negotiations in Web applications: The Latin-American market case

Work on electronic negotiation has motivated the development of systems with strategies specifically designed to establish protocols for buying and selling goods on the Web. On the one hand, there are systems where agents interact with users through dialogues and animations, helping them to find products while learning from their preferences to plan future transactions. On the other hand, there are systems that employ knowledge-bases to determine the context of the interactions and to define the boundaries inherently established by the e-Commerce. This paper introduces the idea of developing an agent with both capabilities: negotiation and interaction in an e-Commerce application via virtual reality (with a view to apply it in the Latin-American market, where both the technological gap and an inappropriate approach to motivate electronic transactions are important factors). We address these issues by presenting a negotiation strategy that allows the interaction between an intelligent agent and a human consumer with Latin-American idiosyncrasy and by including a graphical agent to assist the user on a virtual basis. We think this may reduce the impact of the gap created by this new technology.