Influencing Models in Automated One-to-Many Negotiation

One-to-many negotiation is a type of automated negotiation where one agent negotiates with multiple opponents. We consider the case of one seller agent negotiating with multiple buyer agents for the sale of a single copy of a product in an e-commerce scenario. The negotiation with each buyer agent is done by a sub-seller agent under the control of the seller agent. Influencing among these sub-seller agents in a one-to-many negotiation can result in better gain. In this paper, we propose an influencing model for one-to-many negotiation. We first introduce a new strategy for the buyer based on the keenness of the buyer to make a deal. We next propose a strategy for influencing among these sub-seller agents. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy extensively to show that better gain can be achieved by influencing.