A Data-Driven Method for Recognizing Automated Negotiation Strategies

Abstract

Understanding an opponent agent helps in negotiating with it. Existing works on understanding opponents focus on preference modeling (or estimating the opponent's utility function). An important but largely unexplored direction is recognizing an opponent's negotiation strategy, which captures the opponent's tactics, e.g., to be tough at the beginning but to concede toward the deadline. Recognizing complex, state-of-the-art, negotiation strategies is extremely challenging and simple heuristics may not be adequate for this purpose. We propose a novel data-driven approach for recognizing an opponent's negotiation strategy. Our approach includes (1) a data generation method for an agent to generate domain-independent sequences by negotiating with a variety of opponents across domains, (2) a feature engineering method for representing negotiation data as time series with time-step features and overall features, and (3) a hybrid (recurrent neural network based) deep learning method for recognizing an opponent's strategy from the time series of bids. We perform extensive experiments, spanning four problem scenarios, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.