Approximating the Qualitative Vickrey Auction by a Negotiation Protocol (extended abstract)

Some auction mechanisms can be shown to be efficient and strategy-proof. However, they generally require that the preferences of at least one side of the auction are publicly known. However, sometimes it is very costly, impossible, or undesirable to publicly announce such preferences. It thus is interesting to find methods that do not impose...

Approximating an Auction Mechanism by Multi-Issue Negotiation

The main question addressed in this paper is whether a theoretical outcome determined by an auction mechanism can be reasonably approximated by negotiation among agents in order to drop some of the unrealistic constraints or assumptions presupposed by the mechanism. In particular, we are interested in whether the assumption that a buyer publicly...

Exploring Heuristic Action Selection in Agent Programming (extended abstract)

Rational agents programmed in agent programming languages derive their choice of action from their beliefs and goals. One of the main benefits of such programming languages is that they facilitate a highlevel and conceptually elegant specification of agent behaviour. Qualitative concepts alone, however, are not sufficient to specify that this...

Opponent Modelling in Automated Multi-Issue Negotiation Using Bayesian Learning (extended abstract)

In this paper, we show that it is nonetheless possible to construct an opponent model, i.e. a model of the opponent’s preferences that can be effectively used to improve negotiation outcomes. We provide a generic framework for learning both the preferences associated with issue values as well as the weights that rank the importance of issues to...