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A Survey of Decision Support Mechanisms for Negotiation

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Recent Advances in Agent-Based Negotiation: Applications and Competition Challenges (IJCAI 2022)

Abstract

This paper introduces a dependency analysis and a categorization of conceptualized and existing economic decision support mechanisms for negotiation. The focus of our survey is on economic decision support mechanisms, although some behavioural support mechanisms were included, to recognize the important work in that area. We categorize support mechanisms from four different aspects: (i) economic versus behavioral decision support, (ii) analytical versus strategical support, (iii) active versus passive support and (iv) implicit versus explicit support. Our survey suggests that active mechanisms would be more effective than passive ones, and that implicit mechanisms can shield the user from mathematical complexities. Furthermore, we provide a list of existing economic support mechanisms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the automated negotiation literature the words bid and bidding are rather common, while in the general literature on negotiation the common word is offer.

  2. 2.

    Note that the input comes from many of the mechanisms, but that these input links are not depicted in the figure.

  3. 3.

    Note that FPJ and EmoNeg are names given to these systems by the authors of the current paper.

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Acknowledgment

We like to express our appreciation of Gregory Kersten who made significant contributions for decades to the Negotiation Support System literature. Losing him is a great loss for the negotiation support research community.

This research was (partly) funded by the Hybrid Intelligence Center, a 10-year programme funded the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science through the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, grant number 024.004.022 and by EU H2020 ICT48 project “Humane AI Net” under contract # 952026. Moreover, this work has been partially supported by the Chist-Era grant CHIST-ERA-19-XAI-005, and by (i) the Swiss National Science Foundation (G.A. 20CH21_195530), (ii) the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research, (iii) the Luxembourg National Research Fund (G.A. INTER/CHIST/19/14589586), (iv) the Scientific and Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK, G.A. 120N680).

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Aydoğan, R., Jonker, C.M. (2023). A Survey of Decision Support Mechanisms for Negotiation. In: Hadfi, R., Aydoğan, R., Ito, T., Arisaka, R. (eds) Recent Advances in Agent-Based Negotiation: Applications and Competition Challenges. IJCAI 2022. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1092. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0561-4_3

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