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10. TRENDS OF AI RESEARCH FOR MARKETING

To make the Salesman Expert System more intelligent, the purchase history of individual customers could be maintained as user models. From this history, it would be possible to observe the purchasing patterns of each customer, and suitable combinations could then be suggested in light of the customer's current possessions. In addition, it is important to understand the customer behavior in electronic shopping malls. Thus, consumer research on the electronic market is considered to be an important new area of marketing research (Richmond, 1996; Burke, 1996).

Some of the most active research related to marketing expert system research is being done on electronic agents in the electronic market (Crowston, 1996; Lee and Lee, 1997; Chavez and Maes, 1996; Doorenbos, Etzioni, and Weld, 1996; Kohda and Endo, 1996). Kasbah (Chavez and Maes, 1996) is a virtual marketplace on the Web where users create autonomous agents to buy and sell goods on their behalf. ShopBot (Doorenbos, Etzioni, and Weld, 1996) is a comparison shopping agent that autonomously learns how to shop at vendor home pages, extracts product information such as availability and price, and summarizes the results for the user. UNIK-AGENT (Lee and Lee, 1997) presents an architecture of intelligent agents for electronic commerce, which is an extension of an expert system with the additional capabilities of communication control and metaproblem solving. Kohda and Endo (1996) propose an advertising agent placed between advertisers and users. These agents aim to give benefits like favorable price, more availability, and reduced search cost to economic market entities such as buyers, advertisers, and sellers, etc. Since the agents can become both the opportunity and the threat to marketing managers, it will be critical for a marketing manager to have the capability of understanding and predicting the marketing situations resulting from the interactions among electronic market agents. Crowston (1996) presented a model of the competitive effects of purchasing agents and discussed the possible resistance and benefit when an agent appears in an electronic market. The role of intermediate agents in electronic markets also has important implications to marketing managers (Bailey, 1996; Sarkar, Butler, and Steinfield, 1995). Inventing favorable agents and competing with hostile agents will be an important issue for successful marketing in the electronic commerce environment of the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A part of this chapter has been adopted from the paper, "Customized purchase supporting expert system: UNIK-SES," published in Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal, Volume 11, No. 4, 1996. At the request of the editor, the authors have tried to reduce the references and apologize for missing the important works of others.

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