A Real-Life Experiment in Creating an Agent Marketplace

Software agents help people with time consuming activities. One increasingly popular application for software agents is electronic commerce, namely having agents buy and sell goods and services on behalf of users. We recently conducted a real-life experiment in creating an agent marketplace, using a slightly modified version of the Kasbah system [Chavez96]. Approximately 200 participants intensively interacted with the system over a one-day, six-hour period. This paper describes the setup of the experiment, the architecture of the electronic market and the behaviors of the agents. We discuss the rationale behind the design decisions and analyze the results obtained. We conclude with a discussion of current experiments involving thousands of users interacting with the agent marketplace over a long period of time, and speculate on the long-range impact of this technology upon society and the economy. 1