A meta-strategy for coordinating of one-to-many negotiation over multiple issues

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for managing multi-bilateral concurrent negotiations. We extend our previous work by considering a situation where a buyer agent negotiates with multiple seller agents concurrently over multiple continuous issues instead of a single issue. A related work in this area considers a meta-strategy for bilateral negotiations. This work adapts the previous related work to coordinate multi-bilateral concurrent negotiations taking into consideration the different behaviors of the opponents during negotiation to decide on choosing the appropriate negotiation strategy (i.e., trade-off or concession) for the buyer agent's delegates at each negotiation round. A negotiation meta-strategy to coordinate the one-to-many negotiation form is proposed and empirically tested under various negotiation environments. The experiments show the robustness of our coordination mechanism. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.