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 ANAC2022, we had two leagues: Automated Negotiation League (ANL) and Supply Chain Management League (SCML). For the ANL, the participants designed a negotiation agent that can learn from the previous bilateral negotiation sessions it was involved in. In contrast, the research challenge was to make the right decisions to maximize the overall profit in a supply chain environment, such as determining with whom and when to negotiate. This chapter describes the overview of ANL and SCML in ANAC2022, and reports the results of each league, respectively.

Bargaining can be used to resolve mixed-motive games in multiagent systems. Although there is an abundance of negotiation strategies implemented in automated negotiating agents, most agents are based on single fixed strategies, while it is acknowledged that there is no single best-performing strategy for all negotiation settings. In this paper, we focus on bargaining settings where opponents are repeatedly encountered, but the bargaining problems change. We introduce a novel method that automatically creates and deploys a portfolio of complementary negotiation strategies using a training set and optimise pay-off in never-before-seen bargaining settings through per-setting strategy selection. Our method relies on the following contributions. We introduce a feature representation that captures characteristics for both the opponent and the bargaining problem. We model the behaviour of an opponent during a negotiation based on its actions, which is indicative of its negotiation strategy, in order to be more effective in future encounters. Our combination of feature-based methods generalises to new negotiation settings, as in practice, over time, it selects effective counter strategies in future encounters. Our approach is tested in an Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC)-like tournament, and we show that we are capable of winning such a tournament with a 5.6% increase in pay-off compared to the runner-up agent.

Bidding and acceptance strategies have a substantial impact on the outcome of negotiations in scenarios with linear additive and nonlinear utility functions. Over the years, it has become clear that there is no single best strategy for all negotiation settings, yet many fixed strategies are still being developed. We envision a shift in the strategy design question from: What is a good strategy?, towards: What could be a good strategy? For this purpose, we developed a method leveraging automated algorithm configuration to find the best strategies for a specific set of negotiation settings. By empowering automated negotiating agents using automated algorithm configuration, we obtain a flexible negotiation agent that can be configured automatically for a rich space of opponents and negotiation scenarios. To critically assess our approach, the agent was tested in an ANAC-like bilateral automated negotiation tournament setting against past competitors. We show that our automatically configured agent outperforms all other agents, with a 5.1% increase in negotiation payoff compared to the next-best agent. We note that without our agent in the tournament, the top-ranked agent wins by a margin of only 0.01%.