

Artificially Intelligent Bargain Hunters - fogus
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8185896.stm

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jerf
This provides an interesting counterpoint to one of the classic anti-free-
market arguments, which is that the free market economics is based on the
approximation that customers have a lot of information about a product and can
successfully use that information to negotiate price. The counterargument is
that we do not have such perfect agents creating our system. The counter-
counter argument is to observe that it often works even so.

(As you can probably guess from the shortness of that paragraph, I'm not
actually making those arguments right now, just setting up some context.)

Having truly pervasive electronic agents in the market working on people's
behalf changes that argument chain. Maybe _I_ can't study everything about,
say, a given brand of hard drives, but my agent can learn a lot more on my
behalf. How does this change the way the market works?

Honestly, I have no idea, I'd need way more time to think about this than a
single HN post can be given. I just thought I'd toss this out there, because I
think it's a very thought-provoking question, to the point that I'd say that
if you think you can figure it out in 5 or 10 seconds I feel pretty confident
you're probably off base. (For one thing, there are clearly second-order
effects that will emerge if this ever becomes pervasive.)

You can look to the stock market as an exemplar, but there are a lot of
potentially-relevant differences between the stock market and an economy full
of pervasive use of agents. Price aggregators are another exemplar, but there
are also potentially-relevant differences there. I think a large population of
people using these agents for a lot of consumer goods would have a new effect
of some sort.

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seregine
The article describes these agents as "negotiation ninjas" based on "a series
of simple rules - known as heuristics." That's far from artificial
intelligence. Nothing in the article suggests that the agents do any kind of
learning.

The problem with heuristics is that the best ones make very specific
assumptions, so they usually don't scale to new problem domains, and don't
adapt to changing market conditions.

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spitfire
Automated method of finding the correct price of something? It's called the
stock market.

But I do look forward to having an agent go out and search not just on lowest
price but some fitness function (% of being ripped off, chance of insane s/h
fee's, etc) besides absolute price.

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pie
I've heard a lot about software agents over the last decade or so (they were
hot when I was studying AI in grad school), but I have never seen a
particularly compelling application.

I'm curious to see how well these shopping agents (probably the preeminent
practical example of the technology) actually function in the wild, and how
they're adopted.

If the use of shopping agents actually became a market force, I suspect many
online retailers would need to change various business practices to adapt,
much like websites have adapted by optimizing for search engines.

