Reasoning about commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations

Automated negotiation by software agents is a key enabling technology for agent mediated e-commerce. To this end, this paper considers an important class of such negotiations — namely those in which an agent engages in multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations for a good or service. In particular, we consider the situation in which a buyer agent is looking for a single service provider from a number of available ones in its environment. By bargaining simultaneously with these providers and interleaving partial agreements that it makes with them, a buyer can reach good deals in an efficient manner. However, a key problem in such encounters is managing commitments since an agent may want to make intermediate deals (so that it has a definite agreement) with other agents before it gets to finalize a deal at the end of the encounter. To do this effectively, however, the agents need to have a flexible model of commitments that they can reason about in order to determine when to commi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ACMICEC
• Authors: Thuc Duong Nguyen, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: ACMICEC 2004, Agent Mediated E-commerce, Concurrent Bilateral Negotiations, Key Enabling Technology