FastVOI: Efficient utility elicitation during negotiations

Abstract

Autonomous Negotiation is a promising technology that allows individuals and institutions to reduce the burden and cost of negotiating win-win agreements. A common challenge in practical applications is the inability or high cost of finding the utility value for each possible outcome of the negotiation before it even starts. Earlier work on utility elicitation during negotiations tried to avoid the need of full revelation of the utility function to the agent by interleaving elicitation and negotiation actions. This paper proposes an efficient elicitation algorithm that allows the agent to achieve similar utility at orders of magnitude higher speed compared with the state-of-the-art algorithm.