Towards convenient customer–driven group–buying: an intelligent centralised P2P system

In group–buying, the utility of a customer can only be maximised if the customer can buy the item he or she personally needs at a possibly lowest price, not just an item recommended by another customer or the supplier that he or she is supposed to like. To this end, a software agent is developed in this study to make every customer easily reach the web page he or she browses for a target item for group–buying. An experimental system is constructed in this study to demonstrate the applicability of the software agent. Its advantages and/or disadvantages are also discussed.