Automated Negotiation and Bundling of Information Goods

In this paper, we present a novel system for selling bundles of news items. Through the system, customers bargain with the seller over the price and quality of the delivered goods. The advantage of the developed system is that it allows for a high degree of flexibility in the price, quality, and content of the offered bundles. The price, quality, and content of the delivered goods may, for example, differ based on daily dynamics and personal interest of customers. Autonomous “software agents” execute the negotiation on behalf of the users of the system. To perform the actual negotiation these agents make use of bargaining strategies. We present the novel approach of disentangling bargaining strategies into concession strategies and Pareto efficient search strategies. We show through computer experiments that this approach will result in very efficient bargaining outcomes. Moreover, the system is setup such that it is actually in the best interest of the customer to have their agent adhere to this bargaining approach.