SOSBP: An efficient bargaining protocol for e-market

Abstract

Alternating-Offer Protocol (AOP) is the most predominant way for one-to one bargaining. In this paper, we provide an alternative protocol, Sealed-Offer Synchronous Bargaining Protocol (SOSBP), which can be useful for the automated bargaining between self-interested agents for Open E-Marketplaces. SOSBP introduces an intermediary agent who monitors the bargaining process and hides buyer's offers from seller, and vice versa. Using SOSBP, agents could free submit their offers for evaluating because the intermediary agent has no preference on both buyer and seller. We design some mechanisms to facilitate the success of bargaining, such as Minimum Concession, Concession Reward, Surplus Quote and etc, and present the basic framework of SOSBP. From the result of strategy analysis and experimental study, we concluded that SOSBP has better performance than AOP when agents negotiate under specified situation. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.