Abstract
Most real-world negotiations involve multiple, interdependent issues or attributes. These negotiation scenarios are specially challenging because agents’ preferences on the attributes may be non-monotonic. The existing works in the area of non-monotonic preference scenarios are mainly restricted to mediated approaches and to very specific agents’ preference models. In this research we propose NegoExplorer, a generic framework for non-mediated automated bilateral multi-attribute negotiations. NegoExplorer is based on a region-based recursive bargaining mechanism. The mechanism is named recursive because agents negotiate on regions and not on specific contracts in the negotiation space, and because an agreement on a region implies a new bargaining which is constrained to that region. Agents may reach an agreement on a contract by iteratively applying this recursive mechanism. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal we have compared it with a classical similarity based negotiation protocol. The preliminary results are promising, showing better results in terms of utility and negotiation time for the case of non-monotonic and non-differentiable utility spaces, and similar results for monotonic spaces. We believe that the ideas presented in this paper may be the starting point of a new family of negotiation mechanisms.
This work has been partially developed in the framework of the European ITEA-2 project 2008005, ”Do-it-Yourself Smart Experiences”, and partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science grant TIN2008-06739-C04-04.
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Lopez-Carmona, M.A., Marsa-Maestre, I., de la Hoz, E., Velasco, J.R. (2009). NegoExplorer: A Region-Based Recursive Approach to Bilateral Multi-attribute Negotiation. In: Yang, JJ., Yokoo, M., Ito, T., Jin, Z., Scerri, P. (eds) Principles of Practice in Multi-Agent Systems. PRIMA 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5925. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11161-7_18
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