Abstract
This paper presents the Deniz agent that has been specifically designed to support human negotiators in their bidding. The design of Deniz is done with the criteria of robustness and the availability of small data, due to a small number of negotiation rounds in mind. Deniz’s bidding strategy is based on an existing optimal concession strategy that concedes in relation to the expected duration of the negotiation. This accounts for the small data and small number of rounds. Deniz deploys an adaptive behavior-based mechanism to make it robust against exploitation. We tested Deniz against typical bidding strategies and against human negotiators. Our evaluation shows that Deniz is robust against exploitation and gains statistically significant higher utilities than human test subjects, even though it is not designed specifically to get the highest utility against humans.
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Notes
- 1.
Deniz is a gender-independent name, i.e., it is used for both females and males, and means “sea.”
- 2.
Note that in the first round, move is undefined.
- 3.
Note that \(\small {\text {silent}}\) moves are thus considered here to be cooperative moves.
- 4.
If negotiator n started the negotiation, then in every round i, n is the first to bid, and \(o_n\) is the last. So, when in round i, and referring to the last bid made the opponent, it can well be that that bid was made during the previous round.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all participants that over the years helped us in our experiments. We also give specific thanks to scientific programmer Wouter Pasman, technician Bart Vastenhouw, Dimitrios Teskouras, professor of the course at Erasmus University that hosted part of our experiments, and our collaborator in many negotiation research projects Tim Baarslag.
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Jonker, C.M., Aydoğan, R. (2021). Deniz: A Robust Bidding Strategy for Negotiation Support Systems. In: Ito, T., Zhang, M., Aydoğan, R. (eds) Advances in Automated Negotiations. ACAN 2018. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 905. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5869-6_3
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