Real-Time Coordination of Concurrent Multiple Bilateral Negotiations under Time Constraints

Abstract

This paper addresses a coordination problem during concurrent multiple bilateral negotiations. Real time decisions need to be taken during negotiation to ensure that the overall negotiation process is successful in terms of achieving a valuable agreement (an agreement with high utility). Existing approaches for managing concurrent multiple bilateral negotiation typically rely on historic information such as the probability distribution of the opponents’ reservation prices, deadlines, or the results of the previous negotiations. This paper presents a novel heuristic coordination mechanism for coordinating concurrent multiple bilateral negotiations assuming no previous knowledge about the opponents. The proposed method uses two measures to evaluate the relative behavior of each opponent. The first measure uses the first-order differences of the current negotiation offers and calculates the relative concession for each opponent agent that depends on the mutual concessions of all agents involved in negotiation. The second measure uses a scoring function to evaluate each of the seller’s last offer during negotiation. We use both measures to change the negotiation strategy during negotiation. The empirical results show that our model is more effective when compared with some existing approaches.