Constraint and Bid Quality Factor for Bidding and Deal Identification in Complex Automated Negotiations

Abstract

Complex automated negotiations usually involve multiple, interdependent issues. These negotiation scenarios are specially challenging because the agents’ utility functions are nonlinear, which makes traditional negotiation mechanisms not applicable. Even mechanisms designed and proven useful for nonlinear utility spaces may fail if the utility space is highly nonlinear. For example, although both contract sampling and constraint sampling have been successfully used in auction based negotiations with constraint-based utility spaces, they tend to fail in highly nonlinear utility scenarios. In this paper, we will show that the performance of these approaches decrease drastically in these negotiation scenarios, and propose a mechanism which balances utility and deal probability for the bidding and deal identification processes. The experiments show that the proposed mechanisms yield better results than the previous approaches in terms of optimality and scalability.