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How can an agent learn to negotiate?

  • Part V: Architectures
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Intelligent Agents III Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1193))

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Abstract

Negotiation has been extensively discussed in game-theoretic, economic, and management science literatures for decades. Recent growing interest in autonomous interacting software agents and their potential application in areas such as electronic commerce has given increased importance to automated negotiation. Evidence both from theoretical analysis and from observations of human interactions suggests that if decision makers can somehow take into consideration what other agents are thinking and furthermore learn during their interactions how other agents behave, their payoff might increase. In this paper, we propose a sequential decision making model of negotiation, called Bazaar. It provides an adaptive, multi-issue negotiation model capable of exhibiting a rich set of negotiation behaviors. Within the proposed negotiation framework, we model learning as a Bayesian belief update process. We prove that under certain conditions learning is indeed beneficial.

This research has been sponsored in part by ONR grant #N00014-95-1-1092 and by ARPA Grant #F33615-93-1-1330.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 15213, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Dajun Zeng & Katia Sycara

Authors
  1. Dajun Zeng
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  2. Katia Sycara
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Editor information

Jörg P. Müller Michael J. Wooldridge Nicholas R. Jennings

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zeng, D., Sycara, K. (1997). How can an agent learn to negotiate?. In: Müller, J.P., Wooldridge, M.J., Jennings, N.R. (eds) Intelligent Agents III Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages. ATAL 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1193. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0013589

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0013589

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-62507-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68057-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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