From problems to protocols: Towards a negotiation handbook

Automated negotiation protocols represent a potentially powerful tool for problem solving in decision support systems involving participants with conflicting interests. However, the effectiveness of negotiation approaches depends greatly on the negotiation problem under consideration. Since there is no one negotiation protocol that clearly outperforms all others in all scenarios, we need to be able to decide which protocol is most suited for each particular problem. The goal of our work is to meet this challenge by defining a “negotiation handbook”, that is, a collection of design rules which allow us, given a particular negotiation problem, to choose the most appropriate protocol to address it. This paper describes our progress towards this goal, including a tool for generating a wide range of negotiation scenarios, a set of high-level metrics for characterizing how negotiation scenarios differ, a testbed environment for evaluating protocol performance with different scenarios, and a community repository which allows us to systematically record and analyze protocol performance data.