Meeting Minutes - 25 October 2007

In the LARGE meeting on 25 October, Jordan gave a dry run of her presentation for the upcoming INFORMS meeting. The presentation was entitle How "Good" are Multi-Agent Systems for the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem? Jordan began the presentation by defining the terms in the title, then motivated the topic by a review of the literature, described the methodology of her comparative analysis, and concluded with the results of the analysis.

Overall, the results indicate that multi-agent systems have the capacity to perform competitively in highly dynamic settings. The presentation as a whole could benefit by spending more time on the problem specification, definition of terms, and details of the methodology. Jordan acknowledged these comments and is presently working to add more graphics to the presentation to facilitate defining all the technical terms.

Following Jordan's presentation a brief discussion of the paper, Designing a Better Shopbot, by Montgomery, Hasanagar, Krishnan, and Clay, was held. In this discussion it was generally felt that:
1) The theory was interesting and the detailed description of the shopbot algorithm was computationally intriguing. However, the approached missed out on the psychology of on-line shopping. Thus, the usefulness of such a shopbot was called into question.
2) The product under analysis in this paper is books. As a result, the real power of the algorithm was never truly challenged. That is, the power of the algorithm lies in an ability to track and forecast prices in order to make 'intelligent' suggestions of books to purchase. Unfortunately, book prices do not fluctuate significantly; it would therefore be particularly interesting to apply this model to products with moe price variation - i.e. travel.
3) It was further noted that books do not have too many attributes. So again products, like travel or cell phones, with many many attributes would be a more interesting test of the agent framework.

The meeting concluded with a particularly brief mention of the big paper for next meeting's discussion - E-Commerce Product Recommendation Agents: Use, Characteristics, and Impact by Xiao and Benbasat. Ruud mentioned that he liked what he saw in this article because it seemed that the newer generation of shopping agents described therein incorporated more elements of behavioural decision making theory.

Finally, Wolf announced that the next meeting, 8 November 2007, would focus on the Xiao and Benbasat paper including a presentation by Rob Zuidwijk.