Patent ID: 7373325

Claim:
A software agent stored on a computer-readable medium, the software agent being for a party conducting electronic trading and comprising: (a) a store of a plurality of negotiation profiles each negotiation profile determining a different set of negotiation characteristics and requirements including a mapping for converting respective qualitative attributes for a part of a bid into numerical values representing the qualitative attributes and a weighting factor for each part of a bid; (b) a transaction engine responsive to the commercial situation or state of the party to select an optimal negotiation profile appropriate to that situation or state; (c) a negotiation engine driven by the transaction engine that is able to generate bids and counter bids and is further adapted to compute a single value for a bid by adjusting the numerical value using the weighting factor and summing the adjusted values, the single numerical value being used to determine whether to accept the bid or not; and (d) means, adapted to cause the transaction engine to initiate or conduct e-commerce negotiations using the negotiation engine programmed with the selected negotiation profile.