OAR: A Formal Framework for Multi-Agent Negotiation

In Multi-Agent systems, agents often need to make decisions about how to interact with each other when negotiating over task allocation. In this paper, we present OAR, a formal framework to address the question of how the agents should interact in an evolving environment in order to achieve their different goals. The traditional categorization of selfinterested and cooperative agents is unified by adopting a utility view. We illustrate mathematically that the degree of cooperativeness of an agent and the degree of its self-directness are not directly related. We also show how OAR can be used to evaluate different negotiation strategies and to develop distributed mechanisms that optimize the performance dynamically. This research demonstrates that sophisticated probabilistic modeling can be used to understand the behaviors of a system with complex agent interactions.