Automated Negotiations Under Uncertain Preferences

Automated Negotiation is an emerging field of electronic markets and multi-agent system research. Market engineers are faced in this connection with computational as well as economic issues, such as individual rationality and incentive compatibility. Most literature is focused on autonomous agents and negotiation protocols regarding these issues. However, common protocols show two deficiencies: (1) neglected consideration of agents’ incentives to strive for social welfare, (2) underemphasized acknowledgement that agents build their decision upon preference information delivered by human principals. Since human beings make use of heuristics for preference elicitation, their preferences are subject to informational uncertainty. The contribution of this paper is the proposition of a research agenda that aims at overcoming these research deficiencies. Our research agenda draws theoretically and methodologically on auctions, iterative bargaining, and fuzzy set theory. We complement our agenda with simulation-based preliminary results regarding differences in the application of auctions and iterative bargaining.

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