Accepting optimally in automated negotiation with incomplete information
Accepting optimally in automated negotiation with incomplete information
When a negotiating agent is presented with an offer by its opponent, it is faced with a decision: it can accept the offer that is currently on the table, or it can reject it and continue the negotiation. Both options involve an inherent risk: continuing the negotiation carries the risk of forgoing a possibly optimal offer, whereas accepting runs the risk of missing out on an even better future offer. We approach the decision of whether to accept as a sequential decision problem, by modeling the bids received as a stochastic process. We argue that this is a natural choice in the context of a negotiation with incomplete information, where the future behavior of the opponent is uncertain. We determine the optimal acceptance policies for particular opponent classes and we present an approach to estimate the expected range of offers when the type of opponent is unknown. We apply our method against a wide range of opponents, and compare its performance with acceptance mechanisms of state-of-the-art negotiation strategies. The experiments show that the proposed approach is able to find the optimal time to accept, and improves upon widely used existing acceptance mechanisms.
acceptance strategy, negotiation, optimal stopping
978-1-4503-1993-5
715-722
Baarslag, Tim
a7c541d8-8141-467b-a08c-7a81cd69920e
Hindriks, Koen V.
04b551cd-49a6-49cf-9c83-e1a19317eb0d
May 2013
Baarslag, Tim
a7c541d8-8141-467b-a08c-7a81cd69920e
Hindriks, Koen V.
04b551cd-49a6-49cf-9c83-e1a19317eb0d
Baarslag, Tim and Hindriks, Koen V.
(2013)
Accepting optimally in automated negotiation with incomplete information.
AAMAS2013: 2013 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, Saint Paul, United States.
06 - 10 May 2013.
.
Record type:
Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)
Abstract
When a negotiating agent is presented with an offer by its opponent, it is faced with a decision: it can accept the offer that is currently on the table, or it can reject it and continue the negotiation. Both options involve an inherent risk: continuing the negotiation carries the risk of forgoing a possibly optimal offer, whereas accepting runs the risk of missing out on an even better future offer. We approach the decision of whether to accept as a sequential decision problem, by modeling the bids received as a stochastic process. We argue that this is a natural choice in the context of a negotiation with incomplete information, where the future behavior of the opponent is uncertain. We determine the optimal acceptance policies for particular opponent classes and we present an approach to estimate the expected range of offers when the type of opponent is unknown. We apply our method against a wide range of opponents, and compare its performance with acceptance mechanisms of state-of-the-art negotiation strategies. The experiments show that the proposed approach is able to find the optimal time to accept, and improves upon widely used existing acceptance mechanisms.
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Accepting Optimally in Automated Negotiation with Incomplete Information.pdf
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More information
Published date: May 2013
Venue - Dates:
AAMAS2013: 2013 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, Saint Paul, United States, 2013-05-06 - 2013-05-10
Keywords:
acceptance strategy, negotiation, optimal stopping
Organisations:
Agents, Interactions & Complexity
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 373623
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/373623
ISBN: 978-1-4503-1993-5
PURE UUID: a3b0f735-9ef9-4259-8fc5-952e8d881e42
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Date deposited: 27 Jan 2015 14:06
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 18:55
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Contributors
Author:
Tim Baarslag
Author:
Koen V. Hindriks
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