The First Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2010)

Abstract

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.

Decoupling Negotiating Agents to Explore the Space of Negotiation Strategies

“…The genetic algorithm approach mainly treats the negotiation strategy optimization as a search problem in which the parameters of a small set of strategies are tuned by a genetic algorithm. We analyze a more complex space of newly developed negotiation strategies in our approach, as our pool of surveyed negotiation strategies consists of strategies introduced in the ANAC competition [3,8], as well as the strategies discussed by Faratin et al [18]. Furthermore, each strategy consists of components that can have parameters themselves.…”

“…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.…”

“…There is now a large body of negotiation strategies available, and with the emergence of the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) [3,8], new strategies are generated on a yearly basis.…”

“…While methods exist to determine the best negotiation agent given a set of agents [3,8], we still do not know which type of agent is most effective in general, and especially why. It is impossible to exhaustively search the large (in fact, infinite) space of negotiation strategies; therefore, there is a need for a systematic way of searching this space for effective candidates.…”

The Sixth Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2015)

“…Seven teams had participated and three domains were used. AgentK generated by the Nagoya Institute of Technology team won the ANAC 2010 [2]. The Second Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2011) was held in May 2011, with the AAMAS 2011 conference.…”