On the Empirical Evaluation of an Interdisciplinary Framework for Automated Negotiation

Negotiation is an important and pervasive form of social interaction. The task of designing and implementing autonomous agents with negotiation competence is usually understood as involving the consideration of insights from multiple relevant research areas to integrate different perspectives on negotiation. Hence, this paper uses both game-theoretic techniques and methods from the social sciences as a basis to develop autonomous negotiating agents. It employs game-theoretic techniques to define equilibrium strategies for the bargaining game of alternating offers, and formalizes a set of negotiation strategies and tactics studied in the social sciences and frequently used by human negotiators. This paper also lays the foundation for performing an experiment to investigate the behaviour of autonomous agents equipped with the strategies, paying particular attention to the quality and the cost of bargaining.

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