Reasoning about commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations
Reasoning about commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations
Automated negotiation by software agents is a key enabling technology for agent mediated e-commerce. To this end, this paper considers an important class of such negotiations - namely those in which an agent engages in multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations for a good or service. In particular, we consider the situation in which a buyer agent is looking for a single service provider from a number of available ones in its environment. By bargaining simultaneously with these providers and interleaving partial agreements that it makes with them, a buyer can reach good deals in an efficient manner. However, a key problem in such encounters is managing commitments since an agent may want to make intermediate deals (so that it has a definite agreement) with other agents before it gets to finalize a deal at the end of the encounter. To do this effectively, however, the agents need to have a flexible model of commitments that they can reason about in order to determine when to commit and to decommit. This paper provides and evaluates such a commitment manager and integrates it into the negotiation model.
77-84
Nguyen, T.D.
22ded564-059c-49b0-8a19-1988cb244e39
Jennings, N. R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
2004
Nguyen, T.D.
22ded564-059c-49b0-8a19-1988cb244e39
Jennings, N. R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
Nguyen, T.D. and Jennings, N. R.
(2004)
Reasoning about commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations.
6th International Conference on E-Commerce, Delft, The, Netherlands.
.
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Conference or Workshop Item
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Abstract
Automated negotiation by software agents is a key enabling technology for agent mediated e-commerce. To this end, this paper considers an important class of such negotiations - namely those in which an agent engages in multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations for a good or service. In particular, we consider the situation in which a buyer agent is looking for a single service provider from a number of available ones in its environment. By bargaining simultaneously with these providers and interleaving partial agreements that it makes with them, a buyer can reach good deals in an efficient manner. However, a key problem in such encounters is managing commitments since an agent may want to make intermediate deals (so that it has a definite agreement) with other agents before it gets to finalize a deal at the end of the encounter. To do this effectively, however, the agents need to have a flexible model of commitments that they can reason about in order to determine when to commit and to decommit. This paper provides and evaluates such a commitment manager and integrates it into the negotiation model.
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Published date: 2004
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Event Dates: 2004
Venue - Dates:
6th International Conference on E-Commerce, Delft, The, Netherlands, 2004-01-01
Organisations:
Agents, Interactions & Complexity
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Local EPrints ID: 259562
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/259562
PURE UUID: e6cfdf7e-2117-4f62-ad13-4610c881df13
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Date deposited: 30 Jul 2004
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 06:26
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Contributors
Author:
T.D. Nguyen
Author:
N. R. Jennings
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