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Addressing stability issues in mediated complex contract negotiations for constraint-based, non-monotonic utility spaces

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Abstract

Negotiating contracts with multiple interdependent issues may yield non- monotonic, highly uncorrelated preference spaces for the participating agents. These scenarios are specially challenging because the complexity of the agents’ utility functions makes traditional negotiation mechanisms not applicable. There is a number of recent research lines addressing complex negotiations in uncorrelated utility spaces. However, most of them focus on overcoming the problems imposed by the complexity of the scenario, without analyzing the potential consequences of the strategic behavior of the negotiating agents in the models they propose. Analyzing the dynamics of the negotiation process when agents with different strategies interact is necessary to apply these models to real, competitive environments. Specially problematic are high price of anarchy situations, which imply that individual rationality drives the agents towards strategies which yield low individual and social welfares. In scenarios involving highly uncorrelated utility spaces, “low social welfare” usually means that the negotiations fail, and therefore high price of anarchy situations should be avoided in the negotiation mechanisms. In our previous work, we proposed an auction-based negotiation model designed for negotiations about complex contracts when highly uncorrelated, constraint-based utility spaces are involved. This paper performs a strategy analysis of this model, revealing that the approach raises stability concerns, leading to situations with a high (or even infinite) price of anarchy. In addition, a set of techniques to solve this problem are proposed, and an experimental evaluation is performed to validate the adequacy of the proposed approaches to improve the strategic stability of the negotiation process. Finally, incentive-compatibility of the model is studied.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Engineering Department, Edificio Politecnico, Universidad de Alcala, Ctra. N-II, Km 33.6, 28805, Alcala de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    Miguel A. Lopez-Carmona & Ivan Marsa-Maestre

  2. Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 5 Cambridge Center, NE25-749A, Cambridge, MA, 02142, USA

    Miguel A. Lopez-Carmona, Ivan Marsa-Maestre & Mark Klein

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Gokiso, Showa-ku, Nagoya, 466-8555, Japan

    Takayuki Ito

  4. Todai Policy Alternatives Research Institute, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan

    Takayuki Ito

  5. Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology (PRESTO), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Tokyo, Japan

    Takayuki Ito

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  1. Miguel A. Lopez-Carmona
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  2. Ivan Marsa-Maestre
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Correspondence to Miguel A. Lopez-Carmona.

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M. A. Lopez-Carmona and I. Marsa-Maestre are visiting scholars at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from Universidad de Alcala.

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Lopez-Carmona, M.A., Marsa-Maestre, I., Klein, M. et al. Addressing stability issues in mediated complex contract negotiations for constraint-based, non-monotonic utility spaces. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 24, 485–535 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-010-9159-9

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