Exploring the Strategy Space of Negotiating Agents: A Framework for Bidding, Learning and Accepting in Automated Negotiation

✍ Scribed by Tim Baarslag (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 288
• Series: Springer Theses
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book reports on an outstanding thesis that has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in the area of automated negotiation. It gives new practical and theoretical insights into the design and evaluation of automated negotiators. It describes an innovative negotiating agent framework that enables systematic exploration of the space of possible negotiation strategies by recombining different agent components. Using this framework, new and effective ways are formulated for an agent to learn, bid, and accept during a negotiation. The findings have been evaluated in four annual instantiations of the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC), the results of which are also outlined here. The book also describes several methodologies for evaluating and comparing negotiation strategies and components, with a special emphasis on performance and accuracy measures.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xxi
Introduction....Pages 1-14
Background....Pages 15-52
A Component-Based Architecture to Explore the Space of Negotiation Strategies....Pages 53-69
Effective Acceptance Conditions....Pages 71-89
Accepting Optimally with Incomplete Information....Pages 91-109
Measuring the Performance of Online Opponent Models....Pages 111-127
Predicting the Performance of Opponent Models....Pages 129-146
A Quantitative Concession-Based Classification Method of Bidding Strategies....Pages 147-165
Optimal Non-adaptive Concession Strategies....Pages 167-180
Putting the Pieces Together....Pages 181-194
Conclusion....Pages 195-214
Back Matter....Pages 215-276

✦ Subjects

Robotics and Automation; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods