Bargaining on an Internet Agent-based Market: Behavioral vs. Optimizing Agents

In this paper, we analyze an Internet agent-based market where non-cooperative agents using behavioral rules negotiate the price of a given product in a bilateral and sequential manner. In this setting, we study the optimal decision-making process of a buying agent that enters the market. Our approach is based on Negotiation Analysis (Raiffa, 1982; Sebenuis, 1992) and we consider that the optimizing buying agent maximizes her discounted expected utility using subjective probabilities. The optimal decision-making process of the buying agent is treated as a stochastic control problem that can be solved by dynamic programming. Three types of behavioral agents are studied, namely conceder agents, boulware agents and imitative agents. A set of simulations is undertaken in order to predict the average outcome in a negotiation process for different parameters of the optimizing buying agent and for the three possible selling agents' behaviors. Finally, we compare the performance of the optimizing agent with that of behavioral buying agents.

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