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Generalized Bargaining Protocols

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AI 2023: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI 2023)

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Abstract

Automated Negotiation (AN) is a research field with roots extending back to the mid-twentieth century. There are two dominant AN research directions in recent years: (1) designing new heuristic strategies for the simplest bargaining protocol called the Alternating Offers Protocol (AOP) and (2) defining new mediated protocol that require a trusted third party. Intelligence lies in the strategy in the first direction and the protocol in the latter. This paper argues for a third way that aims at designing unmediated AN protocols with desired properties. We introduce a generalization of AOP to a wide class of unmediated protocols that keep its main advantages while providing the designer with the freedom to design protocols with desired properties. We also introduce the first fruits of this research direction in the form of an unmediated protocol and a corresponding simple strategy that can be shown theoretically to be exactly rational, optimal, and complete for bilateral negotiations with no information about partner’s preferences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We assume standard transitivity on preferences.

  2. 2.

    \(a\succcurlyeq _{{}} b\) means that a is not worse than b. Symbols \(\succ _{{}}, \approx _{{}}\) are defined accordingly.

  3. 3.

    If the codomain of \(u_{{}}\) within the range [0, 1], the utility function is called normalized. Time-pressure can be modeled here by a discounting factor as inagent [24].

  4. 4.

    We will drop the scenario superscript when known from the context.

  5. 5.

    We use the Nash [23] and Kalai [13] Bargaining solutions (and ordinal extensions).

  6. 6.

    It can be shown that no agent can benefit from deviating from this tie-breaking strategy.

  7. 7.

    Defined as the product of optimality, completeness, fairness, and welfare.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NEC CORPORATION, Minato City, Japan

    Yasser Mohammad

  2. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tokyo, Japan

    Yasser Mohammad

  3. Assiut University, Asyut, Egypt

    Yasser Mohammad

Authors
  1. Yasser Mohammad
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Correspondence to Yasser Mohammad .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW, Australia

    Tongliang Liu

  2. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Geoff Webb

  3. The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

    Lin Yue

  4. CSIRO Data61, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Dadong Wang

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Mohammad, Y. (2024). Generalized Bargaining Protocols. In: Liu, T., Webb, G., Yue, L., Wang, D. (eds) AI 2023: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14472. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8391-9_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8391-9_21

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-8391-9

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