Strategic agents for multi-resource negotiation

In electronic commerce markets where selfish agents behave individually, agents often have to acquire multiple resources in order to accomplish a high level task with each resource acquisition requiring negotiations with multiple resource providers. Thus, it is crucial to efficiently coordinate these interrelated negotiations. This paper presents the design and implementation of agents that concurrently negotiate with other entities for acquiring multiple resources. Negotiation agents in this paper are designed to adjust (1) the number of tentative agreements for each resource and (2) the amount of concession they are willing to make in response to changing market conditions and negotiation situations. In our approach, agents utilize a time-dependent negotiation strategy in which the reserve price of each resource is dynamically determined by (1) the likelihood that negotiation will not be successfully completed (conflict probability), (2) the expected agreement price of the resource, and (3) the expected number of final agreements. The negotiation deadline of each resource is determined by its relative scarcity. Agents are permitted to decommit from agreements by paying a time-dependent penalty, and a buyer can make more than one tentative agreement for each resource. The maximum number of tentative agreements for each resource made by an agent is constrained by the market situation. Experimental results show that our negotiation strategy achieved significantly more utilities than simpler strategies.