Agent-Based Decision Making in the Electronic Marketplace: Interactive Negotiation

Negotiation is a process of reaching an agreement on the transaction terms (e.g., price, quantity) for two or more parties. Negotiation tries to maximize the benefits for all parties concerned. Instead of human-based negotiation, the e-commerce environment provides such an environment as adopting automated negotiation. Under these circumstances, choosing agent technology is appropriate for an automatic electronic negotiation platform, since autonomous software agents try to perform the best deal on behalf of the human participants. Negotiation agents need a clear-cut definition of negotiation models or strategies. In reality, most bargaining systems embody almost one negotiation model. In this article, a multi-agent negotiation system with selectable negotiation strategies is introduced. It allows agents to select a user's favorite negotiation strategy, which can be preinstalled as a component in the system. A prototype system is implemented in compliance with FIPA specifications.