Agents for Multi-Issue Negotiation

Abstract

This chapter describes a generic multi-issue negotiating agent that is designed for a dynamic information-rich environment. The agent strives to make informed decisions by observing signals in the marketplace and by observing general information sources including news feeds. The agent assumes that the integrity of some of its information decays with time, and that a negotiation may break down under certain conditions. The agent makes no assumptions about the internals of its opponent—it focuses only on the signals that it receives. Two agents are described. The first agent conducts multi-issue bilateral bargaining. It constructs two probability distributions over the set of all deals: the probability that its opponent will accept a deal, and the probability that a deal should be accepted by the agent. The second agent bids in multi-issue auctions—as for the bargaining agent, this agent constructs probability distributions using entropy-based inference.