Concurrent bilateral negotiation for open e-markets: the Conan strategy

Bedour Alrayes, Ozgur Kafali, Kostas Stathis

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We develop a novel strategy that supports software agents to make decisions on how to negotiate for a resource in open and dynamic e-markets. Although existing negotiation strategies offer a number of sophisticated features, including modelling an opponent and negotiating with many opponents simultaneously, they abstract away from the dynamicity of the market and the model that the agent holds for itself in terms of ongoing negotiations, thus ignoring information that increases an agent’s utility. Our proposed strategy COncurrent Negotiating AgeNts (Conan) considers a weighted combination of modelling the market environment and the progress of concurrent negotiations in which the agent partakes. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the strategy’s performance in various settings where different opponents from the literature provide a competitive market. Our experiments provide statistically significant results showing how Conan outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of the utility gained during negotiations.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)463–501
Number of pages39
JournalKnowledge and Information Systems
Volume56
Early online date28 Oct 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2018

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