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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 these difficulties arise from the differences inherent within the domains, the need to understand and learn negotiators' diverse preferences concerning issues of the domain and the different strategies negotiators can undertake. In this paper we present a system that enables alleviation of the difficulties in the design process of general automated negotiators termed GENIUS, a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multipurpose Usage Simulation. With the constant introduction of new domains, e-commerce and other applications, which require automated negotiations, generic automated negotiators encompass many benefits and advantages over agents that are designed for a specific domain. Based on experiments conducted with automated agents designed by human subjects using GENIUS we provide both quantitative and qualitative results to illustrate its efficacy. Finally, we also analyze a recent automated bilateral negotiators competition that was based on GENIUS. Our results show the advantages and underlying benefits of using GENIUS and how it can facilitate the design of general automated negotiators.

Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between people and automated agents we organized the first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010). The purpose of the competition is to facilitate the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation. The competition was based on the Genius environment, which is a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation. The first competition was held in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-10) and was comprised of seven teams. This paper presents an overview of the competition, as well as general and contrasting approaches towards negotiation strategies that were adopted by the participants of the competition. Based on analysis in post-tournament experiments, the paper also attempts to provide some insights with regard to effective approaches towards the design of negotiation strategies.

Exciting research in the design of automated negotiators is making great progress.

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There is inconclusive evidence whether practicing tasks with computer agents improves people's performance on these tasks. This paper studies this question empirically using extensive experiments involving bilateral negotiation and threeplayer coordination tasks played by hundreds of human subjects. We used different training methods for subjects, including practice interactions with other human participants, interacting with agents from the literature, and asking participants to design an automated agent to serve as their proxy in the task. Following training, we compared the performance of subjects when playing state-of-the-art agents from the literature. The results revealed that in the negotiation settings, in most cases, training with computer agents increased people's performance as compared to interacting with people. In the three player coordination game, training with computer agents increased people's performance when matched with the state-of-the-art agent. These results demonstrate the efficacy of using computer agents as tools for improving people's skills when interacting in strategic settings, saving considerable effort and providing better performance than when interacting with human counterparts.