Multi-Issue Negotiation with Deadlines

Abstract

This paper studies bilateral multi-issue negotiation between self-interested autonomous agents. Now, there are a number of different procedures that can be used for this process; the three main ones being the package deal procedure in which all the issues are bundled and discussed together, the simultaneous procedure in which the issues are discussed simultaneously but independently of each other, and the sequential procedure in which the issues are discussed one after another. Since each of them yields a different outcome, a key problem is to decide which one to use in which circumstances. Specifically, we consider this question for a model in which the agents have time constraints (in the form of both deadlines and discount factors) and information uncertainty (in that the agents do not know the opponent's utility function). For this model, we consider issues that are both independent and those that are interdependent and determine equilibria for each case for each procedure. In so doing, we show that the package deal is in fact the optimal procedure for each party. We then go on to show that, although the package deal may be computationally more complex than the other two procedures, it generates Pareto optimal outcomes (unlike the other two), it has similar earliest and latest possible times of agreement to the simultaneous procedure (which is better than the sequential procedure), and that it (like the other two procedures) generates a unique outcome only under certain conditions (which we define).

Bilateral bargaining with one-sided uncertain reserve prices

“…As a result, the strategies found by their approach are not guaranteed to be sequentially rational given the designed system of beliefs, as shown in [19] for the case with uncertain deadlines. We will further expand on this observation by showing that the strategies developed by Fatima et al [16,17] are not sequentially rational in cases where there is uncertainty over reserve prices.…”

“…This is implicitly done when buyer makes a counteroffer, without making any 'reject' action. In some alternating-offers protocols studied in the literature (e.g., [16]), an agent is required to send a rejection message before making a new offer. However, these protocols are equivalent to ours.…”

“…Section 8 discusses two potential applications of our approach. Section 9 discusses related work and gives an example to show how our approach leads to a different (and the correct) result from the approach designed by Fatima et al [16,17]. Section 10 concludes this paper and outlines some future research directions.…”

“…This is because in the computation of the equilibrium they break down the circularity between strategies and the belief system. For example, Fatima et al [16,17] present a polynomial time algorithm to produce equilibrium strategies in multi-issue bargaining with uncertain reserve prices. By exploiting backward induction, their algorithm searches agents' strategy space from the deadline to the beginning of negotiation with the initial beliefs.…”

Computational Service Economies: Design and Applications

“…In the former case, we have made advances in the areas of auctions (Dash et al, 2007Rogers et al, 2007a;Vetsikas et al, 2007;Gerding et al, 2008), coalition formation (Dang and Jennings, 2006;Fatima et al, 2009;Rahwan and Jennings, 2007;Chalkiadakis et al, 2008;, automated negotiation (Fatima et al, 2006;Karunatillake et al, 2009;Ramchurn et al, 2007;Fatima et al, 2004), trust and reputation , flexible reasoning strategies for workflows (Stein et al, 2009a) and decentralized coordination (Rogers et al, 2007b, Farinelli et al, 2008. In the latter case, we have built applications using these techniques in areas such as: virtual organizations (Norman et al, 2004), emergency response (Chapman et al, 2009), sensor networks (Padhy et al, 2006;Kho et al, 2009;, mobile sensors (Stranders et al, 2009), computational grids (Stein et al, 2009b) and personalized recommendations (Wei et al, 2005;Payne et al, 2006).…”