Electronic agents on the Internet: A new way to satisfy the consumer?

Our purpose in this article is to present the concept of electronic agent used in e-commerce and its impact on consumer satisfaction. Electronic agents represent the future of electronic business. They help the consumers in an environment where all the information is available but hard to deal with. We try to study the electronic agent in a consumer decision process perspective and to examine the different sort of agents depending on their relationships with vendors and consumers. Our final aim is to understand the role of electronic agent onconsumer satisfaction. For that purpose, we conducted a little empirical study which consist in presenting two types of agents to consumers: a good one and a bad one and to evaluate the level of consumer satisfaction.