How to Recognize and Explain Bidding Strategies in Negotiation Support Systems

Effective use of negotiation support systems depends on the systems capability of explaining itself to the user. This paper introduces the notion of an explanation matrix and an aberration detection mechanism for bidding strategies. The aberration detection is a mechanism that detects if one of the negotiating parties deviates from their...

Recognising and explaining bidding strategies in negotiation support systems

To improve a negotiator's ability to recognise bidding strategies, we pro-actively provide explanations that are based on the opponent's bids and the negotiator's guesses about the opponent's strategy. We introduce an aberration detection mechanism for recognising strategies and the notion of an explanation matrix. The aberration detection...

Learning about the opponent in automated bilateral negotiation: A comprehensive survey of opponent modeling techniques

A negotiation between agents is typically an incomplete information game, where the agents initially do not know their opponent’s preferences or strategy. This poses a challenge, as efficient and effective negotiation requires the bidding agent to take the other’s wishes and future behavior into account when deciding on a proposal. Therefore, in...

GENIUS: An integrated environment for supporting the design of generic automated negotiators

The design of automated negotiators has been the focus of abundant research in recent years. However, due to difficulties involved in creating generalized agents that can negotiate in several domains and against human counterparts, many automated negotiators are domain specific and their behavior cannot be generalized for other domains. Some of...

Let's dans! An analytic framework of negotiation dynamics and strategies

The “negotiation dance”, as Raiffa calls the dynamic pattern of the bidding, has an important influence on the outcome of the negotiation. The current practice of evaluating a negotiation strategy is to focus on fairness and quality aspects of the agreement. In this article we present the framework DANS (Dynamics Analysis of Negotiation...

Approximating the Qualitative Vickrey Auction by a Negotiation Protocol

A result of Bulow and Klemperer has suggested that auctions may be a better tool to obtain an efficient outcome than negotiation. For example, some auction mechanisms can be shown to be efficient and strategy-proof. However, they generally also require that additional constraints are met which are not always easy to guarantee in practice. It...

Qualitative One-to-Many Multi-Issue Negotiation: Approximating the QVA

When there is one buyer interested in obtaining a service from one of a set of sellers, multi-attribute or multi-issue auctions can ensure an allocation that is efficient. Even when there is no transferable utility (e.g., money), a recent qualitative version of the Vickrey auction may be used, the QVA, to obtain a Pareto-efficient outcome where...