A Novel Bargaining Protocol for Open E-Marketplaces

Alternating-Offer Protocol (AOP) is the most predominant way for one-to-one bargaining. Almost all past theoretical or practical researches on bargaining issue adopt AOP as the default trading rule. In this paper, we provide an alternative protocol, Sealed-Offer Synchronous Bargaining Protocol (SOSBP), which can be useful for the automated bargaining between self-interested agents for Open E-Marketplaces. To avoid private info losing in using AOP, SOSBP introduces an intermediary agent who monitors the bargaining process and hides buyer´s offers from seller, and vice versa. Using SOSBP, agents could feel submit their offers for evaluating because the intermediary agent has no preference on both buyer and seller. We design some mechanisms to facilitate the success of bargaining, such as Minimum Concession, Concession Reward, Surplus Quote and etc, and present the basic framework of SOSBP. From the result of strategy analysis and experimental study, we concluded that SOSBP has better performance than AOP when agents negotiate under specified situation.