A brokerage framework for Internet commerce

Electronic brokerage is regarded as a core functionality in overcoming many current limitations of Internet commerce. In this paper, we describe current approaches to brokerage services, both, on the Internet and for distributed object systems and analyze how brokerage influences business models for electronic commerce. We then describe OFFER, a project that focuses on advanced models for brokerage on the Internet. We investigate a variety of brokerage services and provide a high-level specification for core components of a generic brokerage service on the Internet. The work should provide a framework to classify existing approaches and a roadmap for further research in this emerging field.