Multi-attribute Bilateral Bargaining in a One-to-Many Setting

Negotiations are an important way of reaching agreements between selfish autonomous agents. In this paper we focus on one-to-many bargaining within the context of agent-mediated electronic commerce. In many cases, auctions can be used to effectively organize one-to-many bargaining. For various situations, however, other protocols may be preferred by the bargainers, as we illustrate in the paper. We consider an approach where a seller negotiates over multiple interdependent attributes with many buyers individually. Bargaining is conducted in a bilateral fashion, using an alternating-offers protocol. In such a one-to-many setting, “fairness,” which corresponds to the notion of envy-freeness in auctions, may be an important business constraint. For the case of virtually unlimited supply (such as information goods), we present a number of one-to-many bargaining strategies for the seller, which take into account the fairness constraint, and consider multiple attributes simultaneously. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: AMEC
• Authors: Enrico H. Gerding, D. J. A. Somefun, Han La Poutré
• Keywords: AMEC 2004, Bargaining Strategies, Information Management, One-to-many Bargaining, One-to-many Bargaining Strategies