On the Study of Negotiation Strategies

The basic idea behind a negotiation is that the agents make offers that they judge “good” and respond to the offers made to them until a compromise is reached. The choice of the offer to propose at a given step in a negotiation dialogue is a strategic matter. In most works on negotiation dialogues, the agents are supposed to be rational, and thus propose and accept only the offers which satisfy all their goals. This strategy is very restrictive since in everyday life, it is difficult to find an offer which satisfies all the agent’s goals. The aim of this paper is to propose less restrictive strategies than the one used in the literature. Those strategies are based not only on the goals and beliefs of the agents but also on their rejections. A three-layered setting is proposed. The properties of each strategy are given as well as a comparative study between these strategies.