A Baseline for Nonlinear Bilateral Negotiations

Abstract

In the past few years, there is a growing interest in automated negotiationin which software agents facilitate negotiation on behalf of their users and try to reach joint agreements. The potential value of developing such mechanisms becomes enormous when negotiation domain is too complex for humans to find agreements (e.g. e-commerce) and when software components need to reach agreements to work together (e.g. web-service composition). Here, one of the major challenges is to design agents that are able to deal with incomplete information about their opponents in negotiation as well as to effectively negotiate on their users’ behalves. To facilitate the research in this field, an automated negotiating agent competition has been organized yearly. This paper introduces the research challenges in Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (ANAC) 2014 and explains the competition set up and results. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the best performing five agent has been examined.