Abstract
We develop a novel strategy that supports software agents to make decisions on how to negotiate for a resource in open and dynamic e-markets. Although existing negotiation strategies offer a number of sophisticated features, including modelling an opponent and negotiating with many opponents simultaneously, they abstract away from the dynamicity of the market and the model that the agent holds for itself in terms of ongoing negotiations, thus ignoring information that increases an agent’s utility. Our proposed strategy COncurrent Negotiating AgeNts (Conan) considers a weighted combination of modelling the market environment and the progress of concurrent negotiations in which the agent partakes. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the strategy’s performance in various settings where different opponents from the literature provide a competitive market. Our experiments provide statistically significant results showing how Conan outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of the utility gained during negotiations.
Highlights
Electronic marketplaces (e-markets) such as E-Bay and Amazon are inter-organisational information systems that enable participating buyers and sellers to exchange information about prices and product offerings online, and typically support all steps of the entire order fulfilment process [9]
In COncurrent Negotiating AgeNts (Conan), we address this point heuristically by studying a self factor St ∈ [0, 1] that depends on how many reserved offers (RO) the agent has made so far, the agent’s negotiation situation (NS) representing progress with all negotiation threads, the effect of the passage of time (TE) and the eagerness (EGb) of our buyer agent to obtain the item under negotiation
We have evaluated the performance of Conan in various settings and showed that it performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art [63], Random and Faratin’s strategies
Summary
Electronic marketplaces (e-markets) such as E-Bay and Amazon are inter-organisational information systems that enable participating buyers and sellers to exchange information about prices and product offerings online, and typically support all steps of the entire order fulfilment process [9]. Bob’s preferred price range is between [700–900] and has a deadline to acquire it within five days He enters the e-market on a Monday and after a quick search, he finds his preferred laptop being sold in an on-line auction. As on-line auctions are time consuming ( the auction’s expiration deadline is in a month’s time), he searches for individual sellers who allow items of interest to be negotiated on-line. He finds two possible sellers: Alice and Tom. Bob starts a negotiation with both sellers at the same time, by making offers to each one of them separately for the laptops they offer. Should he (a) buy from Tom? (b) negotiate with John risking to lose Tom’s offer? or (c) continue to negotiate with all three, in which case what offer should he make to them?
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