A Comparative Study of Argumentation- and Proposal-Based Negotiation

Recently, argumentation-based negotiation has been proposed as an alternative to classical mechanism design. The main advantage of argumentation-based negotiation is that it allows agents to exchange complex justification positions rather than just simple proposals. Its proponents maintain that this property of argumentation protocols can lead to faster and beneficial agreements when used for complex multiagent negotiation. In this paper, we present an empirical comparison of argumentation-based negotiation to proposal-based negotiation in a strategic two-player scenario, using a game-theoretic solution as a benchmark, which requires full knowledge of the stage games. Our experiments show that in fact the argumentation-based approach outperforms the proposal-based approach with respect to the quality of the agreements found and the overall time to agreement.

[1]  Iyad Rahwan,et al.  Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems Second International Workshop, ArgMAS 2005, Revised Selected and Invited Papers , 2006 .

[2]  Warren J. Samuels,et al.  The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics . John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (editors). New York: Stockton Press, 1987, (4 volumes) 949, 1044, 1085, and 1025 pages. , 1990 .

[3]  Tuomas Sandholm,et al.  Distributed rational decision making , 1999 .

[4]  Iyad Rahwan,et al.  Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems: Context and Recent Developments , 2006, ArgMAS.

[5]  B. Schölkopf,et al.  Multi-Robot Negotiation: Approximating the Set of Subgame Perfect Equilibria in General-Sum Stochastic Games , 2007 .

[6]  Carles Sierra,et al.  Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce , 2004, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[7]  Michael Luck,et al.  Multi-Agent Systems and Applications , 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[8]  Gerhard Weiss,et al.  Multiagent systems: a modern approach to distributed artificial intelligence , 1999 .

[9]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  A Classification Scheme for Negotiation in Electronic Commerce , 2001 .

[10]  Iyad Rahwan,et al.  Bargaining and Argument-based Negotiation: Some Preliminary Comparisons , 2004 .

[11]  Peter Norvig,et al.  Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , 1995 .

[12]  Xiaofeng Wang,et al.  Reinforcement Learning to Play an Optimal Nash Equilibrium in Team Markov Games , 2002, NIPS.

[13]  J. Nash.  THE BARGAINING PROBLEM , 1950, Classics in Game Theory.

[14]  Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,et al.  Argumentation-based negotiation , 2003, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[15]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Automated Negotiation and Decision Making in Multiagent Environments , 2001, EASSS.

[16]  Iyad Rahwan,et al.  Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems , 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.