@proceedings{Crowston:1996,
  keywords = {Internet Agent},
  author = {Kevin Crowston and Janice DeGross and Sirkka Jarvenpaa and Ananth Srinivasan},
  title = {Market-enabling Internet agents},
  abstract = {The growth of the Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly exciting feature of Internet commerce is the ability to automate the search for price or other product information across multiple suppliers by using an {\textquotedblleft}agent{\textquotedblright} to retrieve the relevant information. The use of such agents has the potential to dramatically reduce buyers{\textquoteright} search costs. We argue that such agents effectively transform a diverse set of offerings into an economically efficient market and that their use should therefore be analyzed in these terms.
In this paper, we present a simple model of the competitive effects of agents used to support purchasing. The model suggests that agents can be successful for diversified goods but resisted for commodities and near-commodities. We illustrate our model by analyzing the situation of current electronic commerce ventures on the Internet. },
  year = {1996},
  journal = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)},
  address = {Columbus, OH, December},
  language = {eng},
}