Managing commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations

  • Authors:

  • Thuc Duong Nguyen;Nicholas R. Jennings

  • Affiliations:

  • MLB1, PP12, B62 Orion Building (B62-MH), Adastral Park, Martlesham Heath, Ipswich IP5 3RE, UK;School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK

  • Venue:
  • Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

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 commit and to decommit. This paper provides and evaluates such a commitment model and integrates it into a concurrent negotiation model.