Software agents, semi-intelligent autonomous tools, will ploy an increasing
role in electronic commerce applications. This paper gives an overview of
the work at MIT's Media Laboratory on several types of agents for electroni
c commerce, ranging from consumer-to-consumer "smart" classified-ad systems
to merchant agents that provide integrative negotiation capabilities, from
agents that facilitate expertise brokering to distributed reputation Facil
ities, and from point-of-sale comparison-shopping agents to mobile shopping
systems.