Concurrent local negotiations with a global utility function: a greedy approach

摘要

Automated Negotiation is a growing area of research in recent years as it provides a mechanism for intelligent agents representing people and institutions to coordinate their behavior in a complex environment under rational selfish assumptions. Most research in this area assumes either a single negotiation thread with a well-defined utility function for each agent involved or a set of concurrent negotiations with an ordering of outcomes in each local negotiation. In this paper, we consider an agent engaged in a set of concurrent negotiations with a utility function defined only for the complete set of agreements in all of them and no locally defined ordering of outcomes in any negotiation. The paper presents an algorithm that allows such agent to maximize its expected global utility by orchestrating its behavior in all negotiation threads. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed theoretically and empirically using simulation in the context of a trading market.