Genius: An Integrated Environment for Supporting the Design of Generic Automated Negotiators

Abstract

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.

Decoupling Negotiating Agents to Explore the Space of Negotiation Strategies

“…We employ the same negotiation environment as in [3,8,31]; that is, we consider bilateral automated negotiations, where the interaction between the two negotiating parties is regulated by the alternating-offers protocol [35]. The agents negotiate over a set of issues, as defined by the negotiation domain, which holds the information of possible bids, negotiation constraints, and the discount factor.…”

“…We have implemented the BOA architecture as an extension of the Genius framework [31]. Genius stands for Generic Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation, and is a negotiation platform that implements an open architecture supporting heterogeneous agent negotiation.…”

The Sixth Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2015)

“…The details of SAOP is written in the next chapter. [6]. Genius is a research tool for automated multi-issue negotiation, that facilitates the design and evaluation of automated negotiators' strategies.…”

“…In order to help focus research on proficiently negotiating automated agents, we have organized the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC). The results of the different implementations are difficult to compare, as various setups are used for experiments in ad hoc negotiation environments [6]. An additional goal of ANAC is to build a community in which work on negotiating agents can be compared by standardized negotiation benchmarks to evaluate the performance of both new and existing agents.…”

“…We employ an environment that allows us to evaluate agents in a negotiation competition: Genius [6], a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation. Genius helps facilitating the design and evaluation of automated negotiators' strategies.…”