Evaluating Multiparty Multilateral Turn-Taking Negotiation Protocols

In order to be accepted by negotiating parties, negotiation protocols need to be fair and unbiased. We extend the bilateral turn-taking negotiation protocol to multiparty multilateral turn-taking peer negotiation protocols maintaining its fairness properties. We define the de- sign space of such protocols and capture the design decisions that go...

A Machine Learning Approach for Mechanism Selection in Complex Negotiations

Automated negotiation mechanisms can be helpful in contexts where users want to reach mutually satisfactory agreements about issues of shared interest, especially for complex problems with many interdependent issues. A variety of automated negotiation mechanisms have been proposed in the literature. The effectiveness of those mechanisms, however...

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...

What to Bid and When to Stop

Negotiation is an important activity in human society, and is studied by various disciplines, ranging from economics and game theory, to electronic commerce, social psychology, and artificial intelligence. Traditionally, negotiation is a necessary, but also time-consuming and expensive activity. Therefore, in the last decades there has been a...

Towards Understanding Negotiation Strategies: Analyzing the Dynamics of Strategy Components

With modern computers becoming more powerful, automated negotiation is coming more to the forefront of research. Software agents are able to aid human negotiators, help them achieve better outcomes and even negotiate on their behalf. An active topic in the field of automated negotiation concerns the development of negotiation strategies. While...

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...