agent

agent

a person representing a business concern, esp a travelling salesman

Agent

 

in Soviet civil law, a party in a contract of agency. The agent’s duties include the performance of specified legal acts, for example, contracts of sale and management of property, in the name of and on the account of a principal party. The agent may be a legally competent (sui juris) citizen or a legal person (if this is allowed by the latter’s charter or statute). The actions performed by the agent directly generate, change, or extinguish rights and obligations of the principal.

The agent is bound to perform the agency in exact conformity with the principal’s instructions, carry out the agency personally, although in instances provided for by law the responsibilities may be transferred to another person (art. 68 of the RSFSR Civil Code), inform the principal upon demand of progress in performing the agency, submit a report on performance of the agency, and transfer to the principal any property obtained in connection with performance of the agency.

agent

One who is empowered to enter into binding transactions on behalf of another (usually called the principal).

agent

(networking)

In the client-server model, the part of the system that performs information preparation and exchange on behalf of a client or server. Especially in the phrase "intelligent agent" it implies some kind of automatic process which can communicate with other agents to perform some collective task on behalf of one or more humans.

agent

A software routine that waits in the background and performs an action when a specified event occurs. For example, agents could transmit a summary file on the first day of the month or monitor incoming data and alert the user when a certain transaction has arrived. Agents are also called "intelligent agents," "personal agents" and "bots." See mobile agent, bot and workflow.