Caveat mercator in electronic commerce: An update

Conway and Koehler presented a new type of software agent that converted merchant interfaces into middleware that enabled a user to bring to bear powerful decision support tools in eCommerce transactions. They called them Interface Agents. These agents operated directly through the human interface and were largely indistinguishable from a human user. They illustrated their ideas with an agent that could play optimal Blackjack at the then emerging online casinos. They discussed possible merchant countermeasures. In this paper we look back at this setting and see what evolved and how such agents have fared. We reassess their proposed countermeasures and update them based on the ever evolving cat-and-mouse game between such agents and merchants.