eNcentive is an infrastructure that facilitates peer-to-peer electronic commerce in mobile ad-hoc environments. eNcentive employs hierarchical marketing scheme by collecting information like sales promotions and discounts, marketing it to other users in the network and benefiting from it when these users utilize this information.

A user equipped with a PDA running eNcentive platform travels though a geographical region populated by businesses (like restaurants, cafes and drycleaners) that are aggressively broadcasting coupons, advertisements and other promotions to attract extra business.  As the user passes by these businesses, eNcentive platform running on the user's PDA actively collects/caches these coupons and promotions.  The advertisements and coupons can be redeemed at a later time at the business location for any service provider that honors the promotions.  Or alternatively, the user can employ eNcentive platform and become a distributor of these coupons,  promotions and advertisements. In this case, the platform starts active advertising coupons to other eNcentive peer platforms that the user passes by along the way. The peer platforms can cache the advertisements and later redeem them with the business that honor these advertisements or likewise become a distributor. Thus a coupon can be passes from a user to user to yet other user  before it is redeemed. To keep track of this chain, every coupon contains a list of platform IDs of every eNcentive platform that ever handled this coupon.  When user decides to redeem a coupon and presents it to the business, the business after honoring the coupon stores the list of the platform ID for future reference.  Every participating business can choose to reward its most effective distributors with additional discounts or other rewards. For example when a user redeems a coupon the business can check the lists of recently redeemed coupons and see how may times does user's platform's ID appears in the lists. The business can reward the eNcentive user with additional discount or upgrade the product the user was buying.

  Publications

Olga Ratsimor, Anupam Joshi, Timothy Finin, Yelena Yesha,  Intelligent Ad Hoc Marketing within Hotspot Networks, Technical Report, Nov 2003

Olga Ratsimor, Anupam Joshi, Timothy Finin, Yelena Yesha,  eNcentive: A Framework for Intelligent Marketing in Mobile Peer-To-Peer Environments, The 5th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC), October 2003