A Classification Scheme for Negotiation in Electronic Commerce

In the last few yearswe havewitnessed a surge of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce operated on the Internet. However, most current electronic commerce systems are little more than electronic catalogues that allow a user to purchase a product under predetermined and inflexible terms and conditions. We believe that in the next few years we will see a new generation of electronic commerce systems emerge, based on automated negotiation. In this paper, we identify the main parameters on which any automated negotiation depends. To show the applicability of our classification framework, we use it to categorise a representative sample of some of the most prominent negotiation models that exist in the literature. This research was supported by the EPSRC under grant GR/M07076. A previous version of this work appeared in [LWJ00]. This paper has benefited from the comments of several anonymous referees.