| This thesis addresses two areas in electronic commerce. The first is the software engineering practice of designing and developing applications quickly. The use of the object-oriented interfaces defined here can enhance rapid development and ease interoperation. First, by conforming to the Universal Payment Application Interface (U-PAI) and U-DEL interfaces, developers can simply "plug in" any existing payment or delivery mechanism proxy, with no customization required. Second, the Shopping Model Architecture provides a way to encapsulate business process logic as a first-class object, allowing one to link in a new business model or make use of one selected in consultation with the consumer.; The second area of contribution for this thesis is the creation of a theoretical framework for distributed commerce transactions. This new class of problems considers customers who purchase bundles of goods from untrusted brokers and sources across the network, relying on trusted intermediaries to mediate safe sequences of pair-wise exchanges. This thesis presents a distributed algorithm for determining these safe sequences, along with extensions for handling deadlines and additional trust relationships. The correctness of the algorithm is proven formally. Related to the distributed commerce transaction is the problem of competitive sourcing, or choosing among multiple suppliers of equivalent goods. Sources differ in price, reliability, and respsonsiveness. The situation is complicated further by the need to meet deadlines or acquire bundles of goods. A decision theoretic framework and representations of the various strategies permit the comparison and selection of strategies yielding the maximum expected utility. If computing the optimal strategy is too computationally expensive, several heuristic approaches are suggested and quantitatively evaluated. |
