Decoupling Negotiating Agents to Explore the Space of Negotiation Strategies

Every year, automated negotiation agents are improving on various domains. However, given a set of automated negotiation agents, current methods allow to determine which strategy is best in terms of utility, but not so much the reason of success. In order to study the performance of the individual components of a negotiation strategy, we introduce an architecture that distinguishes three components which together constitute a negotiation strategy: the bidding strategy, the opponent model, and the acceptance strategy. Our contribution to the field of bilateral negotiation is twofold: first, we show that existing state-of-the-art agents are compatible with this architecture by re-implementing them in the new framework; secondly, as an application of our architecture, we systematically explore the space of possible strategies by recombining different strategy components, resulting in negotiation strategies that improve upon the current state-of-the-art in automated negotiation.