POMDP based Negotiation Modeling

As the world gets increasingly connected, business and political negotiations need to happen not just between people of similar cultural background but also across people of different cultures. An agent-based computational model of negotiation would help in understanding and improving the inter-cultural negotiation process. A major challenge in the development of such autonomous agents lies in developing the reasoning model of the agent. In this paper, we discuss the issues and challenges of developing a POMDP-based agent model for inter-cultural negotiation. POMDPs are promising for the following reasons: (a) POMDPs provide a decentralized way of solving the problem which is an inherent characteristic of the negotiation domain. (b) POMDPs provide a natural way to capture the sequential nature of the bargaining process i.e. they capture the process rather than just focusing on the outcome. (c) POMDPs can express the various important factors that affect negotiation such as culture.

[1]  J. Brett,et al.  Inter- and Intracultural Negotiation: U.S. and Japanese Negotiators , 1998 .

[2]  C. Tinsley.  Predicting the constellation of conflict management strategies used across cultures. , 2001 .

[3]  Katia P. Sycara,et al.  Bayesian learning in negotiation , 1998, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[4]  Tim Verwaart,et al.  An agent model for the influence of culture on bargaining , 2008, HuCom.

[5]  Gregory E. Kersten,et al.  e-Negotiation Systems and Software Agents: Methods, Models, and Applications , 2006 .

[6]  Philip L. Smith,et al.  Conflicting social motives in negotiating groups. , 2007, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  R. Simmons,et al.  Probabilistic Navigation in Partially Observable Environments , 1995 .

[8]  R. Myerson.  Two-Person Bargaining Problems and Comparable Utility , 1977 .

[9]  Stefan Napel,et al.  Bilateral Bargaining - Theory and Applications , 2002, Lecture notes in economics and mathematical systems.

[10]  Jeanne M. Brett,et al.  The handbook of negotiation and culture , 2004 .

[11]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Security in multiagent systems by policy randomization , 2006, AAMAS '06.

[12]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments , 2001, Intelligent robots and autonomous agents.

[13]  Jeanne M. Brett,et al.  Culture and Negotiation , 2000 .

[14]  Scott Atran,et al.  Reframing Sacred Values , 2008 .

[15]  Sarit Kraus,et al.  Negotiation and Cooperation in Multi-Agent Environments , 1997, Artif. Intell..

[16]  Colin Camerer.  Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction , 2003 .

[17]  Stacy Marsella,et al.  PsychSim: Modeling Theory of Mind with Decision-Theoretic Agents , 2005, IJCAI.

[18]  J. Kagel,et al.  Handbook of Experimental Economics , 1997 .

[19]  Leslie Pack Kaelbling,et al.  Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains , 1998, Artif. Intell..

[20]  Catherine H. Tinsley,et al.  Models of conflict resolution in Japanese, German, and American cultures. , 1998 .

[21]  Dimitri P. Bertsekas,et al.  Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control, Two Volume Set , 1995 .

[22]  Conflict management in the Asia Pacific : assumptions and approaches in diverse cultures , 1998 .

[23]  Joelle Pineau,et al.  Point-based value iteration: An anytime algorithm for POMDPs , 2003, IJCAI.

[24]  Peter Dayan,et al.  Bayesian Model of Behaviour in Economic Games , 2008, NIPS.

[25]  J. Neumann,et al.  Theory of games and economic behavior, 2nd rev. ed. , 1947 .

[26]  Wendi L. Adair,et al.  Starting Out on the Right Foot: Negotiation Schemas When Cultures Collide , 2009 .

[27]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Negotiation decision functions for autonomous agents , 1998, Robotics Auton. Syst..