行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告
線上集體購物系統之研究
計畫類別: 個別型計畫 計畫編號: NSC91-2416-H-110-018- 執行期間: 91 年 08 月 01 日至 92 年 07 月 31 日 執行單位: 國立中山大學資訊管理學系(所) 計畫主持人: 賴香菊 計畫參與人員: 陳俊憲、莊雅婷 報告類型: 精簡報告 處理方式: 本計畫涉及專利或其他智慧財產權,1 年後可公開查詢中 華 民 國 92 年 11 月 2 日
行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫成果報告
A Study of Online Collective Bargaining System
線上集體購物系統之研究
計畫編號:NSC 91-2416-H-110-018
執行期限:91 年 08 月 01 日至 92 年 07 月 31 日
主持人:賴香菊 國立中山大學資訊管理學系
計畫參與人員:陳俊憲、莊雅婷
1. AbstractIf the consumers on the Internet can form a virtual coalition to bargain collectively with the suppliers, it can reduce the transaction cost of both sides. However, it may not be cost effective for a consumer to proceed the whole process personally while it can be a great business if there is an intermediary to facilitate the process. In this research, a brokering process and system framework of an online collective bargaining intermediary have been proposed. In the collective bargaining process, involved negotiation issues and some challenges are discussed too.
Keywords: Collective Bargaining, Collective Purchasing, Virtual Community, Negotiation 中文摘要 如果消費者善用網路虛擬社群的力量向廠商進行集體購物,不僅可以讓買賣雙方享 有網路的優點也可以同時降低交易成本。然而,這樣的交易如果由消費者個人來進行並 不符合成本效益,但對專業的中間商可能是很大的商機所在。本研究針對中間商角色, 提出線上集體購物的仲介流程以及系統的架構,同時也討論了在集體議價過程中所涉及 的談判問題。 關鍵詞:集體議價、集體購買、虛擬社群、談判
2. Research Background and Purpose
The surprising growth of Internet-based commerce has brought numerous advantages to both consumers and suppliers (Hoffman, et al. 1995; Strader & Shaw, 1997). Actually, compared with the traditional business environment, there is a distinguished new advantage to buyers on the Internet in terms of collective bargaining power because the Internet provides many tools to users to form various kind of virtual communities or coalitions. If the buyers with similar product or service requirements can form a virtual coalition to bargain collectively with the sellers, it can reduce the transaction cost of each side (Lai, 1999). Furthermore, the advances of intelligent agents can contribute greatly to the formation of a
virtual coalition as well as the bargaining process. Yamamoto and Sycara (2001) have proposed a stable and efficient buyer coalition formation scheme for e-marketplace. Lauffman and Wang (2001) have explored the new buyers’ arrival in the case of group-buying discounts on the Internet. However, the advantages of collective bargaining for buyers and sellers will not exist without the professional services of an online intermediary because there are many complicated negotiation issues involved in the collective bargaining process. The purpose of this research is to describe the brokering process and hence propose a system framework of the intermediary in online collective bargaining. Because there are many negotiations involved in the collective bargaining process, challenges to negotiation issues will be discussed too.
3. Research Results
3.1 Brokering Process and System Framework
Figure 1 is the brokering process of an electronic collective bargaining broker on behalf of the virtual consumer coalition. First, when a consumer registers his requirement, the registration agent is responsible for it. If the number of registered consumers with similar requirements is not big enough, the recruiting agent will invite more consumers to join it.
.
Customers
Registration Agent
Accept the registration of consumers
Is the number of consumers enough?
Customers
Registration Agent
Accept the registration of consumers
Is the number of consumers enough?
Requirement Integration Agent
Integrate and classify all requirements into two parts:
Common and Individual
Recruiting Agent
Ask more consumers to register through
broadcast
Yes No
Requirement Mediation Agent
Mediate the requirement alternatives and give them rankings
Success?
Search Agent
Find appropriate suppliers Request quotationsBroadcast Agent
through broadcast
Bargain Agent
Bargain with the suppliers on behalf of the consumer alliance
Success?
Contract Agent
Take charge of the contracting process
Monitor Agent
Monitor the fulfillment of the contacts
Fulfilled?
END
Yes No
Yes Is there any other
alternatives? No Yes No Yes Customer Database Product Database Supplier Database Shopping History Outside Internet Information Supporting Database Customer Database Product Database Supplier Database Shopping History Outside Internet Information FAIL No
Figure 1: Brokering Process of Online Collective Purchasing
Whenever there are enough consumers, the requirement integration agent will integrate all requirements and classify them into two parts: common requirements and individual requirements. For example, to buy a car, all consumers must have common requirements
such as size and brand of the car. However, in order to let the brokerage fulfill all buyers’ requirements, the individual requirements such as CD player, color preference should be allowed. Furthermore, in order to work out several acceptable alternatives, the requirement mediation agent will try to mediate the integrated requirements and give the alternatives rankings. It may result in failure because no alternative is acceptable.
After ranking the acceptable alternatives, search agent will start to find qualified suppliers and then broadcast agent will broadcast the requirements to request quotations. After collecting the quotations, bargain agent will try to work out a best purchasing decision on behalf of the virtual consumer coalition. The flexibility of the bargaining depends on the range of the coalition’s authorization. If a bargain is made, then contract agent will facilitate the contracting process. If it fails and there is still other mediated acceptable alternative, the new cycle will start from finding suppliers of the next alternative by the search agent. Otherwise, it will ask the mediation agent to re-mediate the requirements, i.e., to form a new consumer coalition.
After the contracts being signed, monitor agent will monitor the implementing process. In the above process, there are nine agents involved. In order to support all agents’ missions, information from the inside databases such as customer database, product database, supplier database, shopping history, and/or the Internet are required. The data from the bargaining process will be used to update all related databases afterwards. Based on the previous brokering process of a collective purchasing, Figure 2 is the proposed system framework.
Broker Consumer Database Supplier Database Product Database Collective Bargaining History Outside Internet Information Ongoing Bargaining Database Supporting Database Login consumer and supplier login
Recruiting Agent To recruit more consumers Requirement Integration Agent To integrate the common and individual requirements
To mediate and rank the requirement alternatives
Requirement Mediation Agent
Search Agent To search appropriate suppliers
Broadcast Agent To broadcast the request for
quotations
Bargain Agent To bargain with the suppliers Contract Agent To sign the contract
Monitor Agent To monitor the contact implementation Supporting Agents
3.2 Negotiation Issues
For the process in Figure 1, there are negotiation-related issues involved by some agents as follows:
Requirement integration Agent
Normally, the original submitted requirements are different from each other. When the integration agent tries to extract the common requirements and individual requirements, the integrated requirements should reflect all consumers’ requirements stated in their registrations. The first challenge is the original requirement descriptions might be different even the requirements are same. Second, the requirements may consist of multiple items and multiple choices on each item. Furthermore, the final choice on each item may depend on multiple criteria. Therefore, the integration process can be very complicated.
Requirement mediation Agent
Because the integrated requirements may not be feasible, the requirement mediation agent will mediate them with pragmatic considerations and give them rankings. The mediated common requirement is any location in the agreement region among all consumers rather than a particular location only. Similarly, the individual requirement would be any location in each consumer’s acceptance region. The shopping flexibility will depend on the size of the agreement region or the acceptance region. The bigger the common portion of the requirements is, the easier the mediation process will be.
Bargain Agent
Before the bargaining, to identify who are in the consumer coalition and to get their authorizations is very important. The length and complication of the bargaining process will depend on the degree of the authorizations and the gap between the mediated requirements and the quotations of the suppliers. The size of the agreement region represents the degree of the coalition’s authorization. If the bargain breaks down, a new cycle starting from either the search agent or the requirement mediation agent will be activated.
Contract Agent
To sign contract, both authentication and authorization are important at this stage because it is the process to legitimize the bargain result. Then, the agent has to identify the content of contract with each consumer. Finally, it has to sign the contract with the selected supplier on behalf of the consumer coalition. Normally, it is the final step of a negotiation process.
Monitor Agent
In case, the contracts are not fulfilled, the monitor agent may have to negotiate with the supplier or the consumer coalition to solve the problem. How complicated it is depends on the seriousness of the problem.
From the above discussions, there is lots of challenging negotiations to an electronic shopping broker of virtual consumer coalitions. Here we will only point out several critical challenges to the mediation agent. Figure 3 reveals the complication of the negotiation environment.
Let the set of the alternatives of mediated requirement at time t be MRt, i.e., it is the set of all
consumers’ acceptable requirements, } { } ,..., , { 1 2 t t n t t
t MRInd MRInd MRInd MRCom
MR = × Where { 1, 2,..., t} im t i t i t
i mrind mrind mrind
MRInd = is the set of the acceptable mediated individual
requirements of consumer i at time t,
Where t
i t
ij ACCEPTInd
mrind ∈ is an acceptable individual requirement j of consumer i at time
t;
t
i
ACCEPTInd is the acceptance region of consumer i’s individual requirement for
item j at time t; i =1, 2, …, n; j =1, 2, …, m. { 1, 2,..., } 1 t r t t n i t t i
t ACCEPTCom AGREECom mrcom mrcom mrcom
MRCom = = =
=
Ι
is the set of the mediated common requirements agreed by all consumers in th coalition at time t.
Where t
i
ACCEPTCom is the acceptance region of consumer i’s common requirement;
AGREEComt is the agreement region of all consumers’ common requirements; t
k
mrcom is an mediated common requirement k agreed by all
consumers at time t, k = 1, 2, …, r.
Figure 3: Formal Description of Requirements Mediation
First of all, to each consumer, a requirement alternative is (mrindijt,mrcomkt)∈{MRIndit}×{MRComt}.
Either t
i
MRInd or MRComt may consist of more than one acceptable alternative. It turns out
that {MRIndit}×{MRComt} will be{mrindti1,mrindit2,...,mrindtim}×{mrcom1t,mrcomt2,...,mrcomrt}, i.e., there will be mr possible alternatives for each consumer. Definitely, there will be much more possibilities for the whole consumer coalition. It will need the support of a very sophisticated system.
Second, the process will be more uncertain as more consumers join the coalition. The agent has to negotiate not only with each individual consumer but also with the coalition as a whole. Meanwhile, it has to negotiate with the suppliers. It involves one-to-one, one-to-many, and group negotiations. The progress of any these negotiations will affect the process of brokering.
Third, most negotiations will be done more efficiently if multiple issues are bundled as a package for negotiation. However, it is difficult to bundle the common requirement relating to all consumers with the individual requirement relating to a particular consumer only. Fourth, if the broker involves more than one bargain simultaneously, it is challenging to
handle multiple bargains concurrently. Fifth, for consumers from different countries, the
international negotiation process would be more challenging(Kersten & Noronha, 1998).
5. Self-Evaluation
In this research, a brokering process and system framework of an online collective purchasing intermediary have been proposed. Some challenges in the involved negotiations are discussed too. Furthermore, a prototype system has been developed. The next step is to explore the participants’ behavior in the collective purchasing process based on the prototype. We believe we can do several different experiments for different bargaining models. The results are not only valuable in academic field but also pragmatic in practices.
6. References
Bailey, J. P. & Y. Bakos (1997), An Exploratory Study of the Emerging Role of Electronic Intermediaries, International Journal of Electronic Commerce 1(3), pp. 7-20
Benjamin, R., & R. Wigand (1995), Electronic Markets and Virtual Value Chains on the Information Superhighway, Sloan Management Review 32(2), pp. 62-72.
Hoffman, et al. (1995), “Commercial Scenarios for the Web: Opportunities and Challenges,”
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Kersten, G. E., and S. J. Noronha (1998), Supporting International Negotiation with a
WWW-Based System, http://www.business.carletion.ca/
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Lai, Hsiangchu, "Challenging Negotiations to an Electronic Shopping Broker of Virtual Consumer Coalition on the Internet," Proceedings of 5th International Conference of the Decision Sciences Institute, pp. 654-656, Athens, Greece, July 4-7, 1999.
Lauffman, R. J., and B. Wang, “New Buyers’ Arrival Under Dynamic Pricing Market Microstructure: The Case of Group-Buying Discounts on the Internet,” Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 18, No. 2, Fall 2001, pp. 157-188.
Naughton, K.(1996), Revolution in the Showroom, Business Week, Feb. 19, pp. 70 –76. Sarkar, et al. (1995), Intermediaries and Cybermediaries: A Continuing Role for Mediating
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Strader, T. J., & M. J. Shaw (1997), Characteristics of Electronic Markets, Decision Support
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Yamamoto, J., and K. Sycara, “A Stable and Efficient Buyer Coalition formation Scheme for E-Marketplace,” AGENT’01, May 28-June 1, 2001, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.