Beyond Passive Bids and Asks: Mutual Buyer and Seller Discrimination Through Integrative Negotiation in Agent Based Electronic Markets

We describe MARI (Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediary), a project being conducted in the Software Agents group at the MIT Media Lab, and the challenges and issues we are facing in its design and implementation. MARI is an intermediary architecture intended as a generalized platform for the specification and brokering of heterogeneous goods and services. The project reflects our vision of how customized, attribute-based bids and asks can be dynamically generated, resulting in a richer, integrative transaction experience.