Negotiation Among Autonomous Agents: Experimental Evaluation of Integrative Strategies

Autonomous agents generate plans towards the achievement of their goals and, over time, situations arise in which their plans conflict with the plans of other agents. Negotiation is the predominant process for resolving conflicts. This paper presents the key features of a negotiation model for autonomous agents. The model is generic, handles multi-party and multi-issue negotiation, acknowledges the role of conflict as a driving force of negotiation, formalizes a set of human negotiation procedures, allows the dynamic addition and removal of issues, and accounts for a tight integration of the individual capability of planning and the social capability of negotiation. This paper also describes an experiment conducted to evaluate a version of the model that handles two-party, multi-issue negotiation. The results confirmed a number of conclusions about human negotiation