Agent-Based Simulation of C2C Internet Auctions with Online Escrow

Online Escrow is emerging as an effective services to secure online trades in C2C Internet auctions. An online escrow service provider acts as a middle man in the exchange of goods and payment to protect tradersÌ benefit from Internet fraud. The ongoing research presented in this paper is to develop an agent-based distributed experimental system to simulate the online C2C auctions with online escrow. As a methodological exploration, the project is to verify whether software agents could replace human subjects for e-commerce experiments, with the parameters calibrated from the latter.