Studying the impact of negotiation environments on negotiation teams’ performance

Abstract

In this article we study the impact of the negotiation environment on the performance of several intra-team strategies (team dynamics) for agent-based negotiation teams that negotiate with an opponent. An agent-based negotiation team is a group of agents that joins together as a party because they share common interests in the negotiation at hand. It is experimentally shown how negotiation environment conditions like the deadline of both parties, the concession speed of the opponent, similarity among team members, and team size affect performance metrics like the minimum utility of team members, the average utility of team members, and the number of negotiation rounds. Our goal is identifying which intra-team strategies work better in different environmental conditions in order to provide useful knowledge for team members to select appropriate intra-team strategies according to environmental conditions.

A win–win team formation problem based on the negotiation

“…In general, the negotiation process is an iterated process until the goal of the negotiation is achieved successfully. It is essential to set a deadline of the negotiation round in order to assure the results of the negotiation, and in the meanwhile to avoid the infinite iteration (Sánchez-Anguix et al, 2011, 2012b, 2013b. Firstly, we validate the effectiveness of the team formation under different team contexts.…”

“…Finally, the member agents also can represent different stakeholders or different preferences in a team, and solve problems collaboratively and effectively (Sánchez-Anguix et al, 2013a;Fan and Yen, 2004). Nowadays, the agent-based negotiation has been used in many domains, such as electric commerce, business management and collaborative design (Sánchez-Anguix et al, 2013b). The validity of the approach of agent-based negotiation has been confirmed.…”

Developing an emotional-based application for human-agent societies

“…Moreover, groups of people with very similar musical tastes could be detected into the bar. These groups can play as negotiation teams in this process, as in done in [32] and [31]. We are also planning the deployment of our proposal in the MEDERI 4 living lab in our university.…”

Can We Reach Pareto Optimal Outcomes Using Bottom-Up Approaches?

“…It should be highlighted that we are not depicting achieving Pareto optimality as a simple task. However, there is value in computing Pareto optimality in smaller groups as long as we are able to use those solutions in more challenging scenarios: -Negotiation teams: In this scenario, a group of individuals negotiate as a party with opponent(s) to achieve a deal [22,27,26,25,23]. In that case, finding the outcomes that are Pareto optimal within the team may play in favor of the team as (i) if the team sticks to these outcomes while negotiating with opponents, it can ensure efficiency in the final outcome, (ii) the set of calculated deals may be reused in multiple negotiations with different opponents as they remain Pareto optimal, and (iii) finding Pareto optimal outcomes once may reduce the time spent in negotiation threads as the team exactly knows which outcomes are more beneficial for team members.…”