Decoupling negotiating agents to explore the space of negotiation strategies

Abstract

Every year, automated negotiation agents are improving on various domains. However, given a set of negotiation agents, current methods allow to determine which strategy is best in terms of utility, but not so much the reason of success. In order to study the performance of the individual elements of a negotiation strategy, we introduce an architecture that distinguishes three components which together constitute a negotiation strategy: the bidding strategy, the opponent model, and the acceptance condition. Our contribution to the field of bilateral negotiation is threefold: first, we show that existing state of the art agents are compatible with this architecture; second, as an application of our architecture, we systematically explore the space of possible strategies by recombining different strategy components; finally, we briefly review how the BOA architecture has been recently applied to evaluate the performance of strategy components and create novel negotiation strategies that outperform the state of the art.