Buyer agent to enhance consumer awareness: SAATHI

Personal agents have been developed that assist a user with information processing needs by generating, filtering, collecting, or transforming information. On the other hand, internet stores are providing services customized by the needs and interests of individual customers. Such services can be viewed as “seller’s agents” whose goal is to push merchandise and/or services on to the users. This leads us to believe that there is a growing need for deploying “buyer’s agents” whose goal is to best serve the consumer’s interests. The Internet contains a huge volume of information which can overwhelm a buyer. The buyers may often make misinformed decisions based on partial, outdated, irrelevant or incorrect information. We have identified several key functionalities of buyer’s agents whose goal is to reduce information overload and improve relevancy and accuracy of information for consumers. In particular, such agents can make consumers aware of complex interactions between specified preferences and prevailing market conditions, provide differential analysis for decision support, and use domain ontologies to help the user reformulate queries to improve satisfaction with query results. We present SAATHI, a prototype buyer’s agent that demonstrate some of these functionalities in an apartment locator domain.