Researchers believe these shopbots will transform e-commerce, shopping for goods and services for people and companies. Consumers already use rudimentary bots on comparison-shopping sites that query multiple retailers and retrieve prices and other information for users.
Some bots attend online auctions for buyers and bid on their behalf.
Researchers are now designing bots to handle complicated pricing algorithms and complex automated tasks, such as stock market trading, travel arranging, and purchasing and procurement between companies. Because these intelligent agents will be acting as economic decision makers, researchers want to know more about bot behavior before they're turned loose on the Web. N.Y. He and his colleagues study the collective behavior of models of large populations of software agents. Researchers found that bots tend to incite price wars by compulsively undercutting each other. The possibilities are really mind-boggling.