1764 A Virtual Community for Mobile Agents Sheng-Uei Guan Brunel University, UK Fangming Zhu National University of Singapore, Singapore introduction Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is booming with the increasing accessibility of the Internet. E-commerce is revolutionizing the concept of carrying out business functions. By using a Web browser, buyers are able to access numerous e-commerce Web sites, where they can make purchases within a reasonable price range. Suppliers realize that e-commerce is essential to the success and competitiveness of their businesses. The benefits of conducting business online include reduc- tion of the cost for many transactions and streamlining of operations. However, there are also some obstacles to the success of e-commerce. Firstly, buyers may be lost in the ocean of the items available. Secondly, it is a tedious task to the Internet. It acts on behalf of an entity to carry out a delegated task. One of the earliest agents in e- commerce is the shopping agent, which carries out automatic comparative price shopping on the Web. A client can assign one or many shopping agents to carry out the shopping task. Agents can gather price information and present it to the client for a decision. Certainly, the task of a software agent involves more than online data gathering and filtering. For example, software agents are also used in negotiation (Guttman & Maes, 1998; Krishna & Ramesh, 1998). Negotiation agents are instructed with expected prices, quantities, delivery modes, and/or negotiation strategies (Oliver, 1996; Kang, 1998). Besides, software agents can also undertake other tasks, such as payment (Guan & Hua, 2003; Guan et al., 2004), mediation, distribution, in-