PERSPECTIVES IN ELECTRONIC SHOPPING: ON BEYOND AUTOMATED ORDER ENTRY

Abstract

Large-scale electronic shopping systems need to accommodate both (a) a large number of products, many of which are close substitutes, and (b) a heterogeneous body of customers who have complex, multidimensional and perhaps rapidly changing-preferences regarding the products for sale in the system. Further, these systems will have to be designed in a manner so as to both (c) reduce the complexity of the shopping problem from the customer's point of view, and (d) effectively and insightfully match products to customers' needs. The aim of this paper is to address these requirements for electronic shopping systems. We show how an abstraction (or isa) hierarchy with an imposed distance metric can be used as a representational basis for modeling the salesperson's role (as embodied in the surplus and shortage problems) in an electronic shopping system. Further, we indicate how the distance metric, in the context of the abstraction hierarchy, can be interpreted as a unidimensional utility function. Finally, we extend the single dimensional (single perspective) treatment to multiple dimensions, or perspectives, and show how the resulting representation can be interpreted as a multiattribute utility function. We argue that the resulting function is plausible and, most importantly, testable.