Effects of introducing survival behaviours into automated negotiators specified in an environmental and behavioural framework

With the rise of distributed e-commerce in recent years, demand for automated negotiation has increased. In turn, this has engendered a demand for ever more complex algorithms to conduct these negotiations. As the complexity of these algorithms increases, our ability to reason about and predict their behaviour in an ever larger and more diverse negotiation environment decreases. In addition, with the proliferation of internet-based negotiation, any algorithm also has to contend with potential reliability issues in the underlying message-passing infrastructure. These factors can create problems for building these algorithms, which need to incorporate methods for survival as well as negotiation. This paper proposes a simple yet effective framework for integrating survivability into negotiators, so they are better able to withstand imperfections in their environment. An overview of this framework is given, with two examples of how negotiation behaviour can be specified within this framework. Results of an experiment which is based on these negotiation algorithms are provided. These results show how the stability of a negotiation community is affected by incorporating an example survival behaviour into negotiators operating in an environment developed to support this framework. 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.