ABSTRACT

One problem that small businesses in the United States face is that of dispensing with excess inventory. Large organizations, due to their greater amounts of capital, may have explicitly defined business processes or even departments whose existence is based solely on dealing with excess inventory. This is not a small problem, even for small businesses; the total excess inventory held by U.S. small businesses totals many billions of dollars. The opposite side of this issue is that of individual purchasers attempting to find products for prices they are willing to pay, and with financial tools that they would most like to use.

This research project involved construction and implementation of dual intelligent agents to overcome the small business excess inventory AND the individual purchaser product location problems. The premise of the project and experiment was that intelligent agents acting on behalf of both seller and buyer would improve both the excess inventory position of the seller AND the product location and purchase process of the buyer. The results of the experiment show that sellers can sell their excess inventory at higher prices, and that buyers can find products they might otherwise miss and can automatically purchase those products using their preferred financial tools or methods.

REFERENCES

“1992 and 1997 Economic Census” (Updated August, 2002), U.S. Census, www.census.gov.

“Economic Statistics and Research”, 2003, Office of Advocacy, United States Small Business Administration.

“Turning Surplus into Sales”, BusinessWeek Online, November 20, 2000.

Garfolo, B. “An Intelligent System to Help Small Business Dispose of Excess Inventory”, Proceedings Of The Thirty-Third Annual Meeting Of The Western Decision Sciences Institute, Manzanillo, Mexico, April 13-17, 2004.