Negotiating using rewards

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Description/Abstract

In situations where self-interested agents interact repeatedly, it is important that they are endowed with negotiation techniques that enable them to reach agreements that are profitable in the long run. To this end, we devise a novel negotiation algorithm that generates promises of rewards in future interactions, as a means of permitting agents to reach better agreements, in a shorter time, in the present encounter. Moreover, we thus develop a specific negotiation tactic based on this reward generation algorithm and show that it can achieve significantly bettter outcomes than existing benchmark tactics that do not use such inducements. Specifically, we show, via empirical evaluation, that our tactic can lead to a 26% improvement in the utility of deals that are made and that 21 times fewer messages need to be exchanged in order to achieve this under concrete settings.