Leveled Commitment Contracts with Myopic and Strategic Agents

In automated negotiation systems consisting of self-interested agents, contracts have traditionally been binding, i.e., impossible to breach. Such contracts do not allow the agents to e ciently deal with future events. This de ciency can be tackled by using a leveled commitment contracting protocol which allows the agents to decommit from contracts by paying a monetary penalty to the contracting partner. The e ciency of such protocols depends heavily on how the penalties are decided. In this paper, different leveled commitment protocols and their parameterizations are experimentally compared in sequences of multiple contracts. In the di erent experiments, the agents are of di erent types: self-interested or social welfare maximizing, and they can carry out game-theoretic lookahead or be myopic. Several meeting technologies, ways of setting the contract price, and ways of setting and increasing the penalties are compared. Surprisingly, self-interested myopic agents reach a higher socia...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Martin Andersson, Tuomas Sandholm
• Keywords: AAAI 1998, Commitment Contracting Protocols, Intelligent Agents, Myopic Agents, Social Welfare