Optimal Strategies for Agents in an Alternating Offers Negotiation Protocol Considering Time Constraint

This paper analyzes the automated negotiation process between two competitive agents in an alternating offers negotiation model. Generally speaking, the outcome of a negotiation depends on some parameters—the agents’ reservation prices, their attitude toward time and the strategies they use, etc. In most realistic situations, it is not possible for agents to have complete information about all these parameters for its opponent. However, it is general for agents to have partial information about these parameters for its opponent. Under such uncertain situation, our aim is to determine how an agent can exploit the available information in selecting an optimal strategy which maximizes its expected utility. Here, in particular, the optimal strategies are determined considering time constraint. Moreover, we set the concession constraints for each agent to assure the negotiation process is continually shortened. This design can assist researchers in AI (Artificial Intelligence) to construct software agents, where these intelligent agents can optimally negotiate on behalf of users in a given state of knowledge and context. 