Abstract

Automated negotiation by software agents is a key enabling technology for agent mediated e-commerce. To this end, this paper considers an important class of such negotiations – namely those in which an agent engages in multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations for a good or service. In particular, we consider the situation in which a buyer agent is looking for a single service provider from a number of available ones in its environment. By bargaining simultaneously with these providers and interleaving partial agreements that it makes with them, a buyer can reach good deals in an efficient manner. However, a key problem in such encounters is managing commitments since an agent may want to make intermediate deals (so that it has a definite agreement) with other agents before it gets to finalize a deal at the end of the encounter. To do this effectively, however, the agents need to have a flexible model of commitments that they can reason about in order to determine when to commit and to decommit. This paper provides and evaluates such a commitment model and integrates it into a concurrent negotiation model.

Keywords: Agents; Automated negotiation; Commitments; Concurrent negotiation

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. The negotiation model

2.1. The coordinator

2.2. The negotiation threads

2.3. The commitment manager

3. Empirical evaluation

3.1. Experimental setup

3.2. Experimental hypotheses

4. Related work

5. Conclusions and future work

References