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A decentralized model for multi-attribute negotiations

Published: 13 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized model that allows self-interested agents to reach "win-win" agreements in a multi-attribute negotiation. The model is based on an alternating-offer protocol. In each period, the proposing agent is allowed to make a limited number of offers. The responding agent can choose the best offer or reject all of them. In the case of rejection, agents exchange their roles and the negotiation proceeds to the next period. To make counteroffers, an agent first uses the heuristic of choosing, on an indifference curve (or surface), the offer that is closest to the best offer made by the opponent in the previous period, and then taking this offer as the seed, chooses several other offers randomly in a specified neighborhood of this seed offer. Experimental results show that this model can make agents reach near Pareto optimal agreements in general situations where agents have complex preferences on the attributes and incomplete information. Moreover, different from other solutions for multi-attribute negotiations, this model does not require the presence of a mediator.

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  • (2012)A distributed multiobjective approach to negotiations in semi-competitive environments2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation10.1109/CEC.2012.6252952(1-7)Online publication date: Jun-2012
  • (2008)A Generic Framework for Automated Multi-attribute NegotiationGroup Decision and Negotiation10.1007/s10726-008-9119-918:2(169-187)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2008

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '06: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce: The new e-commerce: innovations for conquering current barriers, obstacles and limitations to conducting successful business on the internet
August 2006
624 pages
ISBN:1595933921
DOI:10.1145/1151454
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 August 2006

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Author Tags

  1. automated negotiation
  2. multi-attribute negotiation
  3. pareto optimality
  4. performance analysis
  5. rational preference

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ICEC '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 112 submissions, 47%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Distributed consensus‐based routing protocol with multiple mobile sinks support for wireless sensor networkIET Wireless Sensor Systems10.1049/wss2.1201611:3(131-145)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2021
  • (2012)A distributed multiobjective approach to negotiations in semi-competitive environments2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation10.1109/CEC.2012.6252952(1-7)Online publication date: Jun-2012
  • (2008)A Generic Framework for Automated Multi-attribute NegotiationGroup Decision and Negotiation10.1007/s10726-008-9119-918:2(169-187)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2008

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