Avoiding the prisoner's dilemma in auction-based negotiations for highly rugged utility spaces

Abstract

There is a number of recent research lines addressing complex negotiations in highly rugged utility spaces. However, most of them focus on overcoming the problems imposed by the complexity of the scenario, without analyzing the strategic behavior of the agents in the models they propose. Analyzing the dynamics of the negotiation process when agents with different strategies interact is necessary to apply these models to real, competitive environments, where agents cannot be supposed to behave in the same way. Specially problematic are situations like the well-known prisoner's dilemma, or more generally, situations of high price of anarchy. These situations imply that individual rationality drives the agents towards strategies which yield low individual and social welfares. In highly rugged scenarios, such situations usually make agents fail to reach an agreement, and therefore negotiation mechanisms should be designed to avoid them. This paper performs a strategy analysis of an auction-based negotiation model designed for highly rugged scenarios, revealing that the approach is prone to the prisoner's dilemma. In addition, a set of techniques to solve this problem are proposed, and an experimental evaluation is performed to validate the adequacy of the proposed approaches to improve the strategic stability of the negotiation process.