Agent-Based Negotiation Teams

Agent-based negotiation teams are negotiation parties formed by more than a single individual. Individuals unite as a single negotiation party because they share a common goal that is related to a negotiation with one or several opponents. My research goal is providing agent-based computational models for negotiation teams in multi-agent systems. 1 What are Negotiation Teams? The main subject of my PhD thesis is negotiation teams. In the last few years, research in agent-based negotiation research has mainly focused on negotiation processes where parties are formed by single individuals. However, in real world scenarios negotiations are usually carried out by teams [Behfar et al., 2008; Brodt and Thompson, 2001; Thompson et al., 1996]. This is especially true in organizational settings, where parties may decide to send teams formed by different stakeholders’ representatives. Even though stakeholders share a common goal which is relevant to the negotiation process, they may have different preferences regarding other negotiation sub-goals [Halevy, 2008]. Therefore, sending a negotiation team is also a tool to let organizational stakeholders participate in relevant negotiations which affect their welfare. Furthermore, negotiation processes may be inherently complex and, thus, it may be wise to send teams formed by individuals with different expertise and skills [Behfar et al., 2008; Koc-Menard, 2009]. Even though, real world negotiations usually involve teams, team dynamics are complex and it has stopped social sciences from studying the problem further [Behfar et al., 2008; Brodt and Thompson, 2001; Halevy, 2008; Koc-Menard, 2009; Thompson et al., 1996]. Agent-based systems are not alien to negotiation scenarios where it may be interesting to employ negotiation teams. For instance, imagine a tourism e-market application. It is usual for groups of friends/families to organize their holidays together since they want to spend some time together. However, friends usually have different preferences regarding trip conditions (e.g., cities to visit, hotel location, leisure activities, number of days to spend, budget limitations, etc.). Humans may be extremely slow at coming with a proper negotiated deal that accounts for everyone’s preferences. Thus, agents representing each friend could form a negotiation team that negotiates with travel agencies in an e-market to obtain a quick and good trip package for the group. The application of negotiation teams is not limited to the aforementioned example. It can be extrapolated to other domains such as electronic farming cooperatives, customer coalitions, agent organizational merging, labor negotiations, and so forth. Thus, there is a need for computational models that provide solutions for agent-based systems. As far as we know, there are not studies which have addressed the problem of negotiation teams from the point of view of software agents. My main thesis goal is providing computable models for agent-based negotiation teams in software agent societies. More specifically, I am interested in negotiation models for intra-team dynamics, which I have termed as intra-team organizations. An intra-team organization defines the distribution of roles used by agents in the negotiation, which intra-team strategy is used (which decisions are taken by the team and how and when these decisions are taken), and how agents decide their initial strategy to carry out with the opponent. These models may allow agents to solve team negotiations, such as the ones mentioned above, as optimally as possible while being computable. Additionally, since negotiation teams have not been thoroughly studied by social sciences due to the complexity of team dynamics, some of the results provided by my thesis may also prove useful for social sciences. 2 Completed and Ongoing Research on Negotiation Teams We started studying social sciences’ literature. From this study, I was able to propose a general workflow of tasks for agents that participate in a negotiation team [Sánchez-Anguix et al., 2010]. My thesis work has focused on intra-team organizations, which covers part of the general workflow (part of the pre-negotiation and the whole negotiation process). Basically, an intra-team organization governs how the team behaves and it is structured during the negotiation process (i.e., team dynamics). I decided to focus on this problem because it is possibly one of the issues which affects team performance the most. The aspects that I consider in an intra-team organization are: • Roles: It refers to the responsibilities that the teammates assume. For instance, we may find a flat structure where 2844 Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence