Multi-party negotiation with preferences rather than utilities

The More the Merrier: Multi-Party Negotiation with Virtual Humans

The goal of the Virtual Humans Project at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies is to enrich virtual training environments with virtual humans – autonomous agents that support face-to-face interaction with trainees in a variety of roles – through bringing together many different areas of research including speech recognition, natural language understanding,...

Preferences and Learning in Multi-Agent Negotiation

In online, dynamic environments, the service requested by consumers may not be readily served by the producers. This requires the consumers and producers to negotiate on the content of the service. To automate this process, agents play a key role in e-commerce. As far as the agents’ negotiation strategies are concerned, understanding and reasoning on their users’ preferences are important to ge...

Fuzzy Preferences for Multi-Criteria Negotiation

We are interested in how cooperation can arise in types of environments, such as open systems, where little or nothing is known about the other agents. We view the negotiation problem as a strategic and communication rich process between different local preference/decision models. This contrasts with the classical cooperative game theoretic (axiomatic) view of negotiation process as a centraliz...

Inferring Utilities from Negotiation Actions

In this paper we propose to model a negotiator’s decision-making behavior, expressed as preferences between an offer/counter-offer gamble and a certain offer, by learning from implicit choices that can be inferred from observed negotiation actions. The agent’s actions in a negotiation sequence provide information about his preferences and risk-taking behavior. We show how offers and counter-off...

Utilities , Preferences and Choice