Approximate and online multi-issue negotiation

This paper analyzes bilateral multi-issue negotiation between selfinterested autonomous agents. The agents have time constraints in the form of both deadlines and discount factors. There are m > 1 issues for negotiation where each issue is viewed as a pie of size one. The issues are “indivisible” (i.e., individual issues cannot be split between the parties; each issue must be allocated in its entirety to either agent). Here different agents value different issues differently. Thus, the problem is for the agents to decide how to allocate the issues between themselves so as to maximize their individual utilities. For such negotiations, we first obtain the equilibrium strategies for the case where the issues for negotiation are known a priori to the parties. Then, we analyse their time complexity and show that finding the equilibrium offers is an NP-hard problem, even in a complete information setting. In order to overcome this computational complexity, we then present negotiati...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: S. Shaheen Fatima, Michael Wooldridge, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: ATAL 2007, Bilateral Multi-issue Negotiation, Negotiation, Time Complexity