Effects of introducing survival behaviours into automated negotiators

With the rise of distributed e-commerce in recent years, demand for automated negotiation has increased. In turn, this has facilitated a demand for ever more complex algorithms to conduct these negotiations. As the complexity of these algorithms increases, our ability to reason about and predict their behaviour in an ever larger and more diverse negotiation environment decreases. In addition, with the proliferation of internet-based negotiation, any algorithm also has to contend with potential reliability issues in the underlying message-passing infrastructure. These factors can create problems for building these algorithms, which need to incorporate methods for survival as well as negotiation. This paper proposes a simple yet effective framework for integrating survivability into negotiators, so they are better able to withstand imperfections in their environment. Results of an experiment are provided which show how the stability of a negotiation community is affected by incorporating an example survival behaviour into negotiators operating in an environment developed to support this framework.