Acceptance Conditions in Automated Negotiation

In every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties has to accept an offer to avoid a break off. Therefore, it is important for every negotiator to employ a mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. However, designing a proper acceptance condition is a difficult task: accepting too late may result in the break off of a negotiation, while accepting too early may result in suboptimal agreements. Despite its importance, the theory of acceptance conditions in negotiation has not yet received much attention. Our goal is to classify current approaches and to compare acceptance conditions in an experimental setting. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) [1], we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We focus on decoupled acceptance conditions: i.e., generic acceptance conditions that can be used in conjunction with an arbitrary bidding strategy. Our contribution is fourfold: