A Classification of Product Comparison Agents
Yun Wan Satya Menon Arkalgud Ramaprasad
College of Business Administration
University of Illinois at Chicago
1-312-413-8090 1-312-413-4894
ywan1@uic.edu menon@uic.edu
ABSTRACT
Over the last decade of rise and growth of e-commerce, a large
number and variety of electronic comparison-shopping agents
have emerged on the Web, but little research has been done on
classifying them. In this paper, we propose a conceptual schema
for categorizing comparison-shopping agents into three groups:
differentiation agents, evaluation agents and preference agents.
We describe and analyze each category in detail. We suggest that
comparison-shopping agents can be regarded as a species in the
ecosystem of Internet. They compete and cooperate with each
other for information extraction and aggregation. By extending
the classification, we suggest that a new species of comparison-
shopping agent will emerge driven by technology evolution and
consumer demand.
Keywords
Electronic agent, comparison-shopping, classification, product
comparison agent, derivative agent, Internet ecosystem
1. INTRODUCTION
From the very beginning of the development of B2C electronic
commerce, comparison-shopping has been a popular activity
among consumers because of the characteristics of the online
environment. Compared with traditional retail stores, online
shopping offers potentially unlimited alternatives to satisfy the
demand of consumers. For example, Wal-mart, the biggest brick-
and-mortar chain store, at any time has 100,000 items available on
the shelf in a typical Supercenter1. However, Amazon.com, the
biggest online store can offer as many as 18 million unique items2.
This assortment is further augmented if we include the items in
1
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,37760,00.html
2 agent has been referred to as product comparison agent, shopbot,
http://www.ug.it.usyd.edu.au/isys1003/assignments/amazoncase.d
oc
Copyright is held by the author/owner.
ICEC 2003. Pittsburgh, PA
ACM 1-58113-788-5/03/09
498
1-312-996-9260
prasad@uic.edu
Amazon’s Z-shops offered by third- party vendors who utilize the
platform provided by Amazon to sell to its customer base.
For consumers, the task of selecting the most preferred product
from available alternatives is relatively easy in traditional
environments like Wal-Mart stores, because they are choosing
from limited choice sets. However, this task could become a
major problem in the online environment where the number of
choice alternatives could easily grow beyond the cognitive
capacity of consumers [29]. Recent research studies have shown
that choice overload can easily occur in online and traditional
shopping environments as the number of alternatives become
large, necessitating more cognitive effort in the task of
comparison-shopping [5, 14, 25]. We can expect that in the near
future, when the volume of B2C electronic commerce increases
further and reaches a plateau, the efficiency and effectiveness of
comparison-shopping will be a major bottleneck in the effort to
achieve customer satisfaction.
A large number of comparison-shopping agents of various types
have emerged since the mid-90s to assist consumers to make
choice decisions in online environments [13, 15, 19, 20]. The
earliest of this breed was the bargainfinder introduced by
Anderson Consulting [3]. It allowed a shopper to enter the name
of a music CD and a band s/he wanted to buy, and the software
would then search for the selection at nine on-line stores and
return the price list to the shopper. Subsequently, many other
types of comparison agents emerged, such as pricescan.com,
mysimon.com, epinion.com, and bizrate.com, operating in very
different ways to assist consumers in the same task.
Many researchers have contributed valuable insights about the
impact of comparison-shopping agents [5, 7, 8]. However, we do
not yet have a formal classification system for identifying,
naming, and grouping these agents that often operate in different
ways. For example, there is a lot of confusion about even the
names of these agents; essentially the same comparison-shopping
comparison-shopping agent, recommendation agent, buyer’s
agent as well as aggregator by various researchers [1, 5, 7, 8, 12,
16, 18, 26]. Some of these names capture only a part of the
characteristics of comparison-shopping agents. For instance, it can
be argued that a recommendation agent and an aggregator refer to
two distinct sub-groups of comparison-shopping agents that
operate differently. An aggregator focuses on collecting
quantitative objective information of products and services (like
prices and specifications) while a recommendation agent focuses
on collecting qualitative and subjective information of products
and services (like opinions and reviews). So, the issue of
providing a comprehensive and consistent taxonomy is important
to both industry experts and academic researchers dealing with
comparison-shopping agents. For example, by matching the
current varieties of comparison-shopping agents to the cognitive
processes of online decision-making, we may be able to find new
opportunities for providing better comparison-shopping services.
In this paper, we use a basic classification concept in biology as
an analogy to classify these agents. If we regard the Internet as an
ecosystem that includes various online vendors, then comparison-
shopping agents fit very well in this ecosystem as a class of
herbivores that feed on plant (original data producers like online
vendors) and in turn, become the target of carnivores (upstream
agents or meta-agents). Sitting on the top of the information food
chain are the shopping demands of online shoppers, and their
click stream will in turn be the information “food” for online
vendors. Together, these participants – the shoppers, vendors,
comparison-shopping agents and upstream agents constitute the
complete ecosystem of electronic commerce world.
Figure 1. Internet ecosystem
For simplification of discussion, from now on we use the term
PCA (acronym for Product Comparison Agent) to refer to the
entire class of comparison-shopping agents. Further, for
clarification, we define PCA as an online intelligent software
application that could retrieve, aggregate and process product
information and present them in an appropriate format for
choice-related decision-making by individuals [11, 19, 20].
2. THE ANATOMY OF COMPARISON
Just as biologists group organisms according to their shared
characteristics, we have to first identify the shared characteristics
of PCAs in order to classify them. To do so, we have to focus on
the characteristics of comparison, or more fundamentally, the
anatomy of comparison.
Researchers have suggested that comparison is a thinking process
that involves two modes of thinking: associative reasoning and
rule-based reasoning. The associative reasoning operates by
grouping objects with other objects that are most similar [24]. It is
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more related to subjective experience and operates at a lower level
of consciousness. The rule-based reasoning operates using
abstract symbols based on logical rules that have a certain well-
specified symbolic logical structure [10, 27]. Past research
suggests that these two modes of thinking dominate at different
stages of thinking or may work simultaneously [27].
Specifically, when consumers compare two or more items, they
actually aim to differentiate them and to evaluate the differences
based on certain preferences. These tasks in the process of
comparison use aspects of both associative reasoning and rule-
based reasoning.
Differentiation is essentially a process dominated by rule-based
reasoning because it first abstracts the products in the choice set
into symbols like price, weight, quality, etc. And then, it operates
on these symbols based on certain rules, such as ‘if all other
attributes are the same, the lower priced object is preferred’ [6,
22, 23, 27].
Evaluation involves both rule-based reasoning and associative
reasoning. An evaluation outcome can be drawn either from our
past experience directly (by associative reasoning) or from
quantified experience about the product or the service (by rule-
based reasoning) or from a mix of these two strategies.
Preference Identification is mainly achieved through associative
reasoning. Whenever we have difficulty making trade-offs among
equally attractive choices based on evaluation, we may make the
decision based on a specific preference. For example, when
comparing a Dell PC and a HP PC, if we disregard small
differences between them, the brand name becomes the only
major difference. In such a case, we usually use associative
reasoning to make a choice, say, by comparing past usage
experiences on these two brands.
The goal of a formal comparison process is to pick the choice that
maximizes our utility, based on our preferences. For example, if
we want to buy a car and need to choose from two brands, a
Camry and an Accord, we will first find out the differences
between them on various aspects such as price, reputation, after
sale service, etc. Then by selecting those differences that matter to
us, we begin to evaluate these differences and combine them into
an aggregated utility for comparison. These differentiation and
evaluation processes may be repeated for other alternatives in the
choice set, until we feel that we can make a decision based on the
current evaluation result. Often, we may not find a dominant
choice even in the situation when only two alternatives remain in
the final consideration set if we have to trade-off between
attributes. Then, we have to make a choice based on a subjective
preference, say, that comfort is more important than price. And
based on that preference, we can make a decision.
The three aspects described above, differentiation, evaluation and
preference identification are integral components of the
comparison process. However, they have different properties in
terms of the cognitive processes that are involved.
Specifically, differentiation is objective and quantitative in nature.
Both the input and output of the comparison process are objective
data, irrespective of differences between decision-makers. In
terms of designing the PCA, it implies that the differentiation
operation can be standardized with fixed functionalities.
Evaluation is a mixed process involving both objective and
subjective information, so that different decision-makers may
have different evaluations of the same product. The input of
evaluation can be objective data (e.g. price of product) or
quantified subjective data (e.g. quality of service). The output is
quantified or aggregated utility information for each alternative.
In many cases, evaluation may be conducted based on common
sense. For example, if the only difference between product A and
product B is price and B is less expensive, we can evaluate B as
better than A. However, the situation will become more complex
when the differences are not limited to one dimension, and the
attributes involve trade-offs. For example, Product A may be
different from product B in two aspects: A’s price is higher than
B, but A’s warranty period is also longer than B. In this case, two
consumers may evaluate the two products differently if their
subjective values and weights for the two attributes are different3.
Usually, the larger the number of differences in attributes, the
higher the degree of subjective-ness in the evaluation output.
Preference identification is mainly a cognitive process based on
associative reasoning. The input of this process is scenario
information (i.e., product within a personal usage context, such as
‘a PC for my home office’) instead of product information per se.
It should be noted that the preference identification stage may not
be necessary in decision-making if the evaluation process could
generate a single best choice based on the utility of each
alternative. Preference identification happens when the decision-
maker has trade-off difficulties among several alternatives and
cannot reach a final decision. So preference identification is
complementary to evaluation. For example, an online shopper
finds two models of Personal Digital Assistants equally attractive:
one has a larger memory and the other has a faster CPU. He feels
difficulty in making a choice between these two and checks with a
PCA site such as epinion.com and finds one piece of evaluation is
especially relevant to him: because of large memory, one
commenter has said, she was able to pack more applications into
the PDA and make it really convenient for various purposes.
Because this online shopper is also planning to use the PDA for
similar purposes, he is able to make the decision to buy the brand
with the larger memory instead of the faster CPU.
3. CLASSIFICATION OF PCA
Based on the above discussion, we can group PCAs based on their
distinction in focusing on these three aspects of comparison,
namely differentiation, evaluation and preference identification.
Specifically, we propose that there are three categories of PCAs:
differentiation PCA, evaluation PCA, and preference
identification PCA.
3 inquiry as long as American Airline had a ticket available for that
For details: If A is $20 more expensive than B and A has a
warranty period that is 6 months longer than B, which one offers
more utility to consumer? Different people may have different
opinions. Some may think $20 is worth more than the additional 6
months warranty and hence, decide that B is a better option, while
others may decide the exact opposite.
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3.1 Differentiation PCA
Differentiation PCAs are those comparison-shopping agents that
provide differentiation information for various attributes of choice
alternatives. Currently, the differentiation PCAs available are
mostly price comparison agents such as pricescan.com. These
agents usually target 40-70 or more online vendors and establish a
formal or informal partnership with each of them.
A formal partnership benefits both the agent and the vendors. On
one hand, it enables the agent to extract product information from
vendors without being blocked and if necessary, to contact
vendors to obtain updated product catalogs directly. On the other
hand, the vendors can put restrictions on the information being
obtained by the agent, for example, by providing different pricing
schemes to agents so that they can achieve more accurate market
segmentation.
An informal partnership usually operates in the case of more
powerful agents like pricescan.com. Because of their sheer market
presence, the value of visibility makes many vendors willing to
open their doors to these agents, though there is no formal
partnership between them and there is in fact, some risk of
unfavorable comparison.
We can further classify differentiation PCA into three species
based on their “living mechanism.” They are independent
differentiation PCA, dependent differentiation PCA, and
embedded differentiation PCA.
Figure 2. Categorization of Differentiation PCA
3.1.1 Independent PCA
Independent PCAs usually do not have formal partnership
programs with vendors. Their revenues come from advertisements
of third party vendors that place ads on the search results page4,
the method currently adopted by Google.com [9]. By adopting
this method, they can remain neutral when providing
differentiation information. Pricescan.com and NexTag.com are
typical agents in this category.
3.1.2 Dependent PCA
Dependent PCAs are agents that do have formal partnership with
online vendors. The predecessor of a dependent PCA is the
SABER system for airline seats reservation and ticketing created
by American Airline. Initially, this system always displayed
American Airline’s ticket information at the top for any agent
4
The advertisement is not in the search result but accompany the
result. Usually the agent will use data mining methods to list
relevant advertisements that might be interesting to the consumer
submitting the search query.
route, which put American Airline in a favorable competitive
position relative to other airlines. Pricewatch.com and
pricegrabber.com are both prominent dependent differentiation
agents. They have their respective partner programs and because
of their increasing market power, the entry cost for vendors
wishing to participate is getting higher. Nowadays, it has already
become very costly for small vendors to participate in their
programs.
3.1.3 Embedded PCA
The simplest species of differentiation PCA appears embedded in
websites of major retailers such as Amazon.com. This type of
PCA provides the differentiation information as part of the
product page content. It usually involves only one or two
dimensions of differentiation (e.g., price, condition) for
simplification of comparison. By clicking the comparison button,
customer will be led to another page, which has detailed
comparison information. We call this type of PCA an embedded
PCA because it is embedded into the same product page for
implicit differentiation. Embedded PCA is very efficient because
it only needs limited information processing capabilities on the
customer side, while at the same time it provides some
comparison information to allow customers to make more
informed decisions.
3.2 Evaluation PCA
Evaluation PCAs are comparison-shopping agents that could
provide quantified evaluation information on alternatives. The
input information of evaluation agents can be quantified
subjective experience (e.g. quality of service) or objective
information of alternative choices. Based on the dimensions of
differentiation, we have at least two species of evaluation PCA:
unidimensional evaluation PCA and multidimensional evaluation
PCA.
Figure 3. Categorization of Evaluation PCA
3.2.1 Unidimensional PCA
Unidimensional PCA is almost non-existent for the time being.
Products can hardly be differentiated in just one dimension
anyway. However, such a species can become very useful when
the demand for information is limited by channel capacity or
particular consumer need. For example, with the increasing
popularity of accessing Internet via mobile phone, we can expect
that a demand for simple and quick evaluation services will
emerge for many needs (e.g, traffic routes, airline prices). A
prototype model may look similar to some online survey agents
that examine consumer attitudes (for example, how enjoyable is a
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new TV serial or movie?). The unidimensional PCA that handles
this may collect user ratings, aggregate them and present rating
information as simple percentage number for the mobile phone
user, or as richer chart graph for the PC user to review.
For unidimensional PCA, the immediate research task is to
identify and categorize the general evaluation goals of consumers.
For example, do consumers need traffic route suggestions based
on travel time or travel distance? Based on such goals, PCAs can
provide evaluation services in a predictable format.
3.2.2 Multidimensional PCA
Multidimensional PCA extracts and collects quantified (subjective
or objective) alternative information on multiple dimensions and
aggregates them for review. Multidimensional evaluation PCA is
already popular. Bizrate.com is one prominent agent of this type.
It collects customer experiences at several online stores and asks
customers to quantify these into ratings on various dimensions,
then aggregates them based on a normalized scale for
comparison.
3.3 Preference Identification PCA
Preference agents collect experiences of online shoppers for
different products or services and then aggregate them for
decision-making. Preference agents emerged because of the
analogical way in which human beings think and make decisions
[21, 28]. They provide different situational contexts for the
comparison and evaluation of products or services instead of
comparing products or service per se. Context information is
collected from peer reviewers. So, if consumers cannot find
appropriate context-relevant information based on their own
experiences, they can use peer experiences as surrogates to
identify their preferences and make choice decisions. This is
particularly relevant for services (e.g., hotels, restaurants,
concerts, cruises) where preferences can vary significantly across
situational contexts (e.g., usage occasions, seasons, goals).
Epinion.com is representative of a preference PCA. At
epinion.com, online shoppers submit their opinions about
products and services. Epinion.com then aggregates them and
summarizes them for use. When an online shopper wants to
compare several options in a particular category, s/he may review
opinions on these options at Epnions.com and if a piece of opinion
matches his or her usage context, it may be used to make a choice
decision.
Preference PCA is different from Evaluation PCA in processing
subjective information. Preference PCA does not quantify
subjective information while Evaluation PCA quantifies
subjective evaluations or ratings into data format.
The following table summarizes the key aspects of the three
categories of PCAs.
 Table 1. Comparison of PCAs

Differentiation PCA Evaluation PCA Preference PCA

Input format Objective/Quantitative Subjective/Objective Subjective/Descriptive

Quantification
Processing Categorization Summarization
/Aggregation
Output format Data format Data format Text format

4. META-AGENT AND THE

INFORMATION FOOD CHAIN
In the previous section, we talked about the classification of
PCAs. If we regard the Internet as an ecosystem and comparison-
agents as species that feed on information and in turn, produce
information for others, we can predict that as the demand for
further aggregated comparisons increases, a new type of PCA, the
Meta-agent will emerge. And in addition, all these agents as well
as the online shopper demand and click-stream will form an
information food chain within the ecosystem of the Internet.

4.1 Derivative PCA

Meta-agents are agents that feed on the information produced by
other agents. The Meta-search engine, askjeeves.com is one
example of such an agent. There are vast number of Meta-agents
under development. Here, we focus on Meta-agents that feed on
PCAs, or the so-called Derivative PCA. There are hardly any
Derivative PCAs on the Internet now, so what we will do here is
establish the concept of Derivative PCA, describe their
characteristics, and demonstrate that the emergence of such agents
is inevitable.
Figure 4: Relationship between derivative PCA and PCA
Derivative PCAs are comparison-shopping agents that collect
information from other PCAs and aggregate them for use. Their
The emergence of a formal derivative PCA is perhaps
information output will be updated whenever the information
unavoidable because of current inefficiencies in the way that
from their underlying PCAs changes. For example, a consumer
PCAs operate. Many researchers have suggested that the network
wants to buy several products and send the demand to a derivative
structure of the Internet is not randomly connected but connected
PCA. The derivative PCA will probe various differentiation
in a way that follows power law distribution [2, 17]. That is to
PCAs, evaluation PCAs and preference PCAs, obtain necessary
say, a majority of the nodes have only a limited number of
information regarding these products, aggregate them, and then
connections while a few popular nodes share a huge number of
present to consumers in an appropriate format. If any information
connections. With a structure that follows power law distribution,
is updated by underlying PCAs during the process (e.g. shipping
we have the danger of missing a lot of small vendors (nodes) that
charge changes), the derivative PCA’ s information output format
have limited connections (web visibility) though they may provide
will change accordingly (e.g. total price change).
quality services. For example, search engines like Google utilize
this power law distribution structure to provide search services
Many PCAs already possess some derivative features. For
[4]. This implies that when we use Google to search for certain
example, many differentiation PCAs began to provide vendor-
products, we may invariably get directed to major branded
rating information along with the product attribute information
vendors like Amazon.com or buy.com, rather than to smaller
they collect from vendors. This rating information is obtained
vendors. Those small but quality vendors cannot be effectively
from external evaluation agents like bizrate.com or their own
selected because of their weak web visibility.
embedded evaluation agents. In either case, like the evolution of
species, these differentiation agents are no longer as simple in
The emergence of PCA only partially solved this problem: they
functioning as they used to be. They are evolving into a more
collect and aggregate information from these small vendors but at
complex species with a higher level of information extracting
most, manage to cover a small part of the vast Internet. So, we can
status by synthesizing two types of information.
expect that with the further expansion of Internet and emergence

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of even more PCAs, derivative PCAs will inevitably emerge to
collect and aggregate relevant information from these PCAs and
naturally replace them to assist online shoppers in decision-
making.
We can also expect that derivative PCAs will emerge from more
than one category. Some of them may focus on aggregating
information of differentiation and evaluation PCAs. They may
quite probably evolve from current differentiation PCAs. Others
may focus on collecting and aggregating evaluation and
preference information to prevent online shopper from making
erroneous decision based on false preferences. The book review
and rating system implemented by Amazon.com is one such kind
of agent in the making. It combines an evaluation PCA and a
preference PCA by allowing readers to post their comments on the
book and at the same time rate the comments provided by others.
So, by observing the approval and disapproval rate (evaluation) on
each comment (preference), potential book buyers will be better
informed while making their decisions.
4.2 Information food chain
Derivative PCA is by no means the final link in the chain of
information processing in the ecosystem of the Internet. More
sophisticated comparison agents will emerge as a consequence of
evolving consumer demand. To better illustrate this point, we can
conceptualize the entire online comparison-shopping system as an
information food chain. There are two sources of original
information: those provided by online vendors and those coming
from online shoppers. Online vendors provide product
information and online shoppers provide click-stream, reviews,
and user information. Feeding on that category of information are
the various PCAs we discussed such as differentiation PCA,
evaluation PCA and preference PCA. Online shoppers are
currently using the information provided by these PCA, but with
the evolution of consumer demand, derivative PCA will substitute
the first-generation PCAs to provide better assistance to
consumers. They will combine information from various PCA and
aggregate them for consumer. Derivative PCA may also be
replaced by more advanced PCA with the evolution of consumer
demand. For example, we may expect a more intelligent PCA will
emerge to evaluate the trustworthiness of information provided by
derivative PCA so consumers will feel more confident when using
the information provided by derivative PCAs.
By including all above into one system, we will get an
information food chain for online comparison-shopping. In one
direction, information is produced, aggregated and consumed
through the online vendor, PCA, derivative PCA, more advanced
PCA and online shopper. In the other direction, revenues
generated by online shopper will get distributed among agents and
online vendors as determined by a market mechanism.
5. SUMMARY
In this paper, we propose a classification schema for web-based
comparison-shopping agents. There are three basic categories of
PCA based on our classification scheme. They are differentiation
PCAs, evaluation PCAs and preference PCAs. We demonstrate
that more sophisticated comparison-shopping agents, that we
named derivative PCAs and more advanced PCAs, will emerge
with the expansion of Internet and increasing consumer demand.
And as a result, online vendors, PCAs, derivative PCAs, more
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advanced PCAs and online shoppers will make up an information
food chain within the Internet ecosystem.
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