Can Social Agents Efficiently Perform in Automated Negotiation?

Abstract

In the last few years, we witnessed a growing body of literature about automated negotiation. Mainly, negotiating agents are either purely self-driven by maximizing their utility function or by assuming a cooperative stance by all parties involved in the negotiation. We argue that, while optimizing one’s utility function is essential, agents in a society should not ignore the opponent’s utility in the final agreement to improve the agent’s long-term perspectives in the system. This article aims to show whether it is possible to design a social agent (i.e., one that aims to optimize both sides’ utility functions) while performing efficiently in an agent society. Accordingly, we propose a social agent supported by a portfolio of strategies, a novel tit-for-tat concession mechanism, and a frequency-based opponent modeling mechanism capable of adapting its behavior according to the opponent’s behavior and the state of the negotiation. The results show that the proposed social agent not only maximizes social metrics such as the distance to the Nash bargaining point or the Kalai point but also is shown to be a pure and mixed equilibrium strategy in some realistic agent societies.

An Effective Negotiation Strategy for Quantitative and Qualitative Issues in Multi-Agent Systems

“…This paper fills the gap of addressing the problem of negotiating both quantitative and qualitative issues at once as it was mentioned in the first part of this section that most related work discuses the negotiation problem over a single or multiple quantitative issues negotiation issues [20,21].…”

“…What makes this work different from other related works is that it presents a negotiation scenario that considers both quantitative and qualitative negotiation issues at once for an object (car in our scenario). Most related works in the literature consider either a single or multiple quantitative issue(s) [20,21] and rarely consider qualitative issues. Negotiation strategies for such a scenario are discussed and applied in a realistic business negotiation scenario (buying and selling cars).…”

Time Series Predictive Models for Opponent Behavior Modeling in Bilateral Negotiations

“…For a more robust strategy, Faratin et al suggest adopting a hybrid strategy, which combines both time and behavior-dependent tactics similar to the strategy presented in [11]. Moreover, another strategy determines several negotiation states and proposes adopting a specific bidding tactic for each state while considering the opponent's consecutive offers [15].…”

Enterprise negotiation and communication management system under the guidance of the Internet of Things

“…Since the advent of NSS, there has yet to be a commonly recognized, systematic, and precise definition. Nonetheless, it is widely believed that the NSS as a computer-based system can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of negotiations [ 9 ]. Later, the NSS was considered a human-computer interaction system.…”