...overcome. 

It is also possible to design shopbots which query servers directly, but once again there is the problem of formulating such queries and parsing their replies.

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...strategies:

It is also possible to consider all buyers as utility maximizers, with the additional cost of searching for the lowest price made explicit in the buyer utility functions. The cost of this search is zero for bargain hunters, but it is infinity for those buyers who use the any seller strategy.

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...18#18 

We assume that buyers' valuations are uncorrelated with their buying strategies.

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...myoptimal 

In the game-theoretic literature, this adaptive strategy is known as best-reply, or Cournot, dynamics [2].

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...hunters 

Recall that bargain hunters in this model represent the use of shopbots.

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...title! 

It has been argued that shopbots could potentially increase the position of large market players and monopolists, who by utilizing such a strategy could prevent the entry of smaller players into markets [16]. In the case of Internet sales companies, however, start-up costs are not particularly significant [14], so that while a large player could utilize such a strategy for a short time, with smaller players springing up regularly, such a strategy would eventually be deemed unprofitable.

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