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Acceptance conditions in automated negotiation

Acceptance conditions in automated negotiation
Acceptance conditions in automated negotiation
In every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties has to accept an offer to avoid a break off. A break off is usually an undesirable outcome for both parties, therefore it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When designing such conditions one is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the current offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC), we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We focus on decoupled acceptance conditions, i.e. conditions that do not depend on the bidding strategy that is used. We performed extensive experiments to compare the performance of acceptance conditions in combination with a broad range of bidding strategies and negotiation domains. Furthermore we propose new acceptance conditions and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions that we study. In particular, it is shown that they outperform the standard acceptance condition of comparing the current offer with the offer the agent is ready to send out. We also provide insight in to why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation environment and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.
978-90-73461-99-4
Baarslag, Tim
a7c541d8-8141-467b-a08c-7a81cd69920e
Hindriks, Koen
37537aff-8c5e-420e-b424-1cb0c26aa7d7
Jonker, Catholijn
492a7c03-c206-4fad-9a9c-a156a96c4245
Baarslag, Tim
a7c541d8-8141-467b-a08c-7a81cd69920e
Hindriks, Koen
37537aff-8c5e-420e-b424-1cb0c26aa7d7
Jonker, Catholijn
492a7c03-c206-4fad-9a9c-a156a96c4245

Baarslag, Tim, Hindriks, Koen and Jonker, Catholijn (2011) Acceptance conditions in automated negotiation. ICT.Open 2011, Netherlands Antilles. 14 - 15 Nov 2011.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

In every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties has to accept an offer to avoid a break off. A break off is usually an undesirable outcome for both parties, therefore it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When designing such conditions one is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the current offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC), we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We focus on decoupled acceptance conditions, i.e. conditions that do not depend on the bidding strategy that is used. We performed extensive experiments to compare the performance of acceptance conditions in combination with a broad range of bidding strategies and negotiation domains. Furthermore we propose new acceptance conditions and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions that we study. In particular, it is shown that they outperform the standard acceptance condition of comparing the current offer with the offer the agent is ready to send out. We also provide insight in to why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation environment and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.

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More information

Published date: 2011
Venue - Dates: ICT.Open 2011, Netherlands Antilles, 2011-11-14 - 2011-11-15
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 373767
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/373767
ISBN: 978-90-73461-99-4
PURE UUID: 2160f857-62c5-4432-b162-fc82d8c94630
ORCID for Tim Baarslag: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-1662-3910

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 03 Feb 2015 15:51
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 18:57

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Contributors

Author: Tim Baarslag ORCID iD
Author: Koen Hindriks
Author: Catholijn Jonker

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