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...

Designing Generic and Efficient Negotiation Strategies

The central aim of this thesis is the design of generic and efficient automated strategies for two-party negotiations in which negotiating parties do not reveal their preferences explicitly. A strategy for negotiation is the decision mechanism for determining the actions of a negotiator. Generic refers to the idea that the strategy needs no...

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...

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...

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...