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Agents in electronic commerce: Component technologies for automated negotiation and coalition formation

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Cooperative Information Agents II Learning, Mobility and Electronic Commerce for Information Discovery on the Internet (CIA 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1435))

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Abstract

Automated negotiation and coalition formation among self-interested agents are playing an increasingly important role in electronic commerce. Such agents cannot be coordinated by externally imposing their strategies. Instead the interaction protocols have to be designed so that each agent really is motivated to follow the strategies that the protocol designer wants it to follow. This paper reviews six component technologies that we have developed for making such interactions less manipulable and more efficient in terms of the computational processes and the outcomes:

  1. 1.

    OCSM-contracts in marginal cost based contracting,

  2. 2.

    leveled commitment contracts,

  3. 3.

    anytime coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees,

  4. 4.

    trading off computation cost against optimization quality within each coalition,

  5. 5.

    distributing search among insincere agents, and

  6. 6.

    unenforced contract execution.

Each of these technologies represents a different way of battling self-interest and combinatorial complexity simultaneously. This is a key battle when multiagent systems move into large scale open settings.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under CAREER Award IRI-9703122 and Grant No. IRI-9610122.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Washington University, One Brookings Drive, 63130-4899, St. Louis, MO

    Tuomas Sandholm

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  1. Tuomas Sandholm
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Matthias Klusch Gerhard Weiß

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Sandholm, T. (1998). Agents in electronic commerce: Component technologies for automated negotiation and coalition formation. In: Klusch, M., Weiß, G. (eds) Cooperative Information Agents II Learning, Mobility and Electronic Commerce for Information Discovery on the Internet. CIA 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1435. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053679

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053679

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64676-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69109-9

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