A negotiation protocol with recommendation for multilateral negotiation in trust networks

Abstract

Negotiation protocols are crucial in automated negotiation since they establish the rules that govern the negotiation process. Multilateral negotiations, i.e., those involving a higher number of participants, are typically more complex than bilateral negotiations and often suffer from issues such as excessive time consumption or a lack of fairness. Some protocols have been developed to address these issues by reducing the complexity of multilateral negotiations: for instance, introducing a mediator to make negotiations more effective. However, many existing approaches overlook the crucial aspect of trust relationships between agents, even though trust significantly influences their actions. To this end, we propose a mediator-based multilateral negotiation protocol that can fully utilize trust networks among negotiating agents and strike a balance between fairness and efficiency. The mediator employs a recommendation mechanism based on a trust network to conduct negotiation, thus leading the negotiation toward the expected outcomes. This recommendation mechanism demonstrates a high efficiency gains under various scenarios where agents use different time-based concede strategies.