Bidding Support by the Pocket Negotiator Improves Negotiation Outcomes

This paper presents the negotiation support mechanisms provided by the Pocket Negotiator (PN) and an elaborate empirical evaluation of the economic decision support (EDS) mechanisms during the bidding phase of negotiations as provided by the PN. Some of these support mechanisms are offered actively, some passively. With passive support we...

A Survey of Decision Support Mechanisms for Negotiation

This paper introduces a dependency analysis and a categorization of conceptualized and existing economic decision support mechanisms for negotiation. The focus of our survey is on economic decision support mechanisms, although some behavioural support mechanisms were included, to recognize the important work in that area. We categorize...

The 13th International Automated Negotiating Agent Competition Challenges and Results

An international competition for negotiating agents has been organized for years to facilitate research in agent-based negotiation and to encourage the design of negotiating agents that can operate in various scenarios. The 13th International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2022) was held in conjunction with IJCAI2022. In...

AhBuNe Agent: Winner of the Eleventh International Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (ANAC 2020)

The International Automated Negotiating Agent Competition introduces a new challenge each year to facilitate the research on agent-based negotiation and provide a test benchmark. ANAC 2020 addressed the problem of designing effective agents that do not know their users’ complete preferences in addition to their opponent’s negotiation strategy...

ANAC 2017: Repeated Multilateral Negotiation League

The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) is annually organized competition to facilitate the research on automated negotiation. This paper presents the ANAC 2017 Repeated Multilateral Negotiation League. As human negotiators do, agents are supposed to learn from their previous negotiations and improve their negotiation skills over...

Distributed Multi-agent Negotiation for Wi-Fi Channel Assignment

Channel allocation in dense, decentralized Wi-Fi networks is a challenging due to the highly nonlinear solution space and the difficulty to estimate the opponent’s utility model. So far, only centralized or mediated approaches have succeeded in applying negotiation to this setting. We propose the first two fully-distributed negotiation...

Deniz: A Robust Bidding Strategy for Negotiation Support Systems

This paper presents the Deniz agent that has been specifically designed to support human negotiators in their bidding. The design of Deniz is done with the criteria of robustness and the availability of small data, due to a small number of negotiation rounds in mind. Deniz’s bidding strategy is based on an existing optimal concession strategy...

Time Series Predictive Models for Opponent Behavior Modeling in Bilateral Negotiations

In agent-based negotiations, it is crucial to understand the opponent’s behavior and predict its bidding pattern to act strategically. Foreseeing the utility of the opponent’s coming offer provides valuable insight to the agent so that it can decide its next move wisely. Accordingly, this paper addresses predicting the opponent’s coming...

Explanation-Based Negotiation Protocol for Nutrition Virtual Coaching

People’s awareness about the importance of healthy lifestyles is rising. This opens new possibilities for personalized intelligent health and coaching applications. In particular, there is a need for more than simple recommendations and mechanistic interactions. Recent studies have identified nutrition virtual coaching systems (NVC) as a...

Effect of Awareness of Other Side’s Gain on Negotiation Outcome, Emotion, Argument, and Bidding Behavior

Designing agents aiming to negotiate with human counterparts requires additional factors. In this work, we analyze the main elements of human negotiations in a structured human experiment. Particularly, we focus on studying the effect of negotiators being aware of the other side’s gain on the bidding behavior and the negotiation outcome. We...

Comparing Mediated and Unmediated Agent-Based Negotiation in Wi-Fi Channel Assignment

Channel allocation in dense Wi-Fi networks is a complex problem due to its nonlinear and exponentially sized solution space. Negotiating over this domain is a challenge, since it is difficult to estimate opponent’s utility. Based on our previous work in mediated techniques, we propose the first two fully-distributed multi-agent negotiations...

Ontology-Based Reflective Communication for Shared Human-AI Recognition of Emergent Collaboration Patterns

When humans and AI-agents collaborate, they need to continuously learn about each other and the task. We propose a Team Design Pattern that utilizes adaptivity in the behavior of human and agent team partners, causing new Collaboration Patterns to emerge. Human-AI Co-Learning takes place when partners can formalize recognized patterns of...

The Quarrel of Local Post-hoc Explainers for Moral Values Classification in Natural Language Processing

Although popular and effective, large language models (LLM) are characterised by a performance vs. transparency trade-off that hinders their applicability to sensitive scenarios. This is the main reason behind many approaches focusing on local post-hoc explanations recently proposed by the XAI community. However, to the best of our knowledge,...

Metrics for Evaluating Explainable Recommender Systems

Recommender systems aim to support their users by reducing information overload so that they can make better decisions. Recommender systems must be transparent, so users can form mental models about the system’s goals, internal state, and capabilities, that are in line with their actual design. Explanations and transparent behaviour of the...

A General-Purpose Protocol for Multi-agent Based Explanations

Building on prior works on explanation negotiation protocols, this paper proposes a general-purpose protocol for multi-agent systems where recommender agents may need to provide explanations for their recommendations. The protocol specifies the roles and responsibilities of the explainee and the explainer agent and the types of information...

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...