Reaching Unanimous Agreements Within Agent-Based Negotiation Teams With Linear and Monotonic Utility Functions

TL;DR

This paper introduces an agent-based negotiation model for teams with shared interests, ensuring unanimous decisions through a trusted mediator, and evaluates its robustness and parameter impacts empirically.

Contribution

It presents a novel negotiation model that guarantees unanimity within agent teams using linear and monotonic utility functions, with empirical analysis of its robustness.

Findings

Guarantees unanimous team decisions during negotiations

Model is robust against various manipulations

Empirical results show impact of different parameters

Abstract

In this article, an agent-based negotiation model for negotiation teams that negotiate a deal with an opponent is presented. Agent-based negotiation teams are groups of agents that join together as a single negotiation party because they share an interest that is related to the negotiation process. The model relies on a trusted mediator that coordinates and helps team members in the decisions that they have to take during the negotiation process: which offer is sent to the opponent, and whether the offers received from the opponent are accepted. The main strength of the proposed negotiation model is the fact that it guarantees unanimity within team decisions since decisions report a utility to team members that is greater than or equal to their aspiration levels at each negotiation round. This work analyzes how unanimous decisions are taken within the team and the robustness of the model against different types of manipulations. An empirical evaluation is also performed to study the impact of the different parameters of the model.