The design and evaluation of an intelligent sales agent for online persuasion and negotiation

Online purchases from e-stores are getting popular among Internet users. Although many e-commerce activities, such as auctions, bargaining, and recommendation services are available, most e-stores lack clerk-like mechanisms to persuade potential buyers into buying products and to bargain with them for making a good deal. The objectives of this research are to design a lab prototype of a sales agent with persuasion and negotiation capabilities and to evaluate its effectiveness as a virtual clerk in an e-store. The prototypical intelligent sales agent ( ISA) is equipped with reinforcement learning capabilities and an abstract argument framework. We conduct both laboratory and Internet experiments to assess ISA's performance. The experimental results reveal that an e-store embedded within such a sales agent can improve a seller's surplus and increase a buyer's product valuation, willingness-to-pay, and satisfaction with the e-store. (C) 2006 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.