A Component-Based Architecture to Explore the Space of Negotiation Strategies

Abstract

In order to study the performance of the individual components of a negotiation strategy, we introduce an architecture that distinguishes three components which together constitute a negotiation strategy: the bidding strategy (B), the opponent model (O), and the acceptance strategy (A). When decoupled, the components of different strategies can be recombined to create new strategies. This then allows to pinpoint additional structure in most agent designs and to explore the space of automated negotiating agents. In order to study the performance of the individual components of a negotiation strategy, we introduce an architecture that distinguishes three components which together constitute a negotiation strategy: the bidding strategy (B), the opponent model (O), and the acceptance strategy (A). When decoupled, the components of different strategies can be recombined to create new strategies. This then allows to pinpoint additional structure in most agent designs and to explore the space of automated negotiating agents. We implemented our BOA architecture in a generic evaluation environment for negotiating agents (Appendix A), and we amended it with the strategy components of the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (Appendix B). In doing so, we have a rich evaluation tool at our disposal, together with a repository that contains many negotiating agents and scenarios. The contribution of this chapter is threefold: first, we show that existing state-of-the-art agents are compatible with this architecture by re-implementing them in the new framework; second, as an application of our architecture, we systematically explore the space of possible strategies by recombining different strategy components, resulting in negotiation strategies that improve upon the current state-of-the-art in automated negotiation; finally, we show how the BOA architecture can be applied to evaluate the performance of strategy components and create novel negotiation strategies that outperform the state of the art.