Earticle

In allusion to the production and marketing problems among the supply chain enterprises, the multi-agent technology is applied in the two-stage supply chain to establish a concurrent negotiation model under incomplete information constraint. The coordination strategy based on particle swarm optimization can update the belief value of the negotiating agents during the negotiation process, thus to further support the continuous negotiation. The simulation result not only verifies the feasibility and the effectiveness of this model, but also shows that this model is superior to other concurrent negotiation models in the aspects of negotiation result utility, negotiation time and negotiation success rate.

Due to the uncertainty of the green product market, the manufacturers assume enormous R&D and manufacturing risks. Under such background, the problem regarding the cooperation between the manufacture and the retailer becomes an important factor influencing the decisions and the profits of the two parties. In allusion to such problem, the revenue sharing contract is proposed in this article to promote the deep cooperation between the manufacturer and the retailer. Firstly, in consideration of such factors as product greenness and risk avoidance, the centralized decision-marking model and the manufacturer predominated Stackelberg game model are established, wherein the supply chain efficiency of the latter model is discovered to be less than that of the former model. Therefore, the revenue sharing contract is proposed to coordinate the green supply chain so as to make the overall profit and efficiency of the supply chain reach the corresponding level of the centralized decision-making model. Finally, the numerical experiment is carried out to verify the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed revenue sharing contract. The experiment result shows that the revenue contract can well coordinate the cooperative relationship between the manufacturer and the retailer and meanwhile maximally improve the utilities and the profits for the two parties.

Though studies on negotiations have actively been conducted in the field of e-Commerce so far, some problems have yet to be solved and many application fields of negotiation systems exist. Currently, many businesses shift from various fields to e-Commerce market, due to recent social changes and expansion of e-Commerce market; however, we need to develop the study of automated agents to resolve the issue of negotiation, which is an essential element in the e-Commerce, by minimizing human interference under the e-Commerce environment. In this study, we intend to propose a new negotiation protocol considering the negotiation alternatives through continuous negotiation rounds in relation to an automated negotiation issue whose participants are one to N (seller to buyers). We also present an agent-facilitated negotiation methodology by which negotiation alternative generation process is automated, in consideration of buyer's negotiation attributes and strategies in the negotiation system.

The development of IT and explosively growing number of Internet users are rapidly spreading and developing e-commerce, while creating diverse on-line transaction methods such as a negotiation, a reverse auction, and a bid. Among these transaction methods, the transactions by means of a negotiation are being made for goods that have no posted price. In particular, the transactions by means of a negotiation are expected to be widely used in the B2B. In order to determine their transportation costs, shippers usually make negotiations with many transporters and logistics companies. And before long, these negotiations are expected to be made on an on-line automated negotiation system. Because of this, this study has tried to develop an automated negotiation methodology that is absolutely necessary for an on-line automated negotiation. This study has estimated and selected the evaluation functions for multi-lateral negotiators' proposals, thus developing an automated negotiation methodology. As a result of this study, a new direction for an automated negotiation has been suggested. Also we expect that this study will be widely used in the automated negotiation of diverse fields.