Negotiating over small bundles of resources

When rational but myopic agents negotiate over the exchange of indivisible resources, any restriction to the negotiation protocol may prevent the system from converging to a socially optimal allocation in the general case. This paper addresses this issue by analysing how the confinement to certain classes of utility functions can enable agents to move to an optimal allocation by negotiating over small bundles of items at a time. In particular, we consider so-called kseparable domains, where the full set of resources can be divided into several preferentially independent bundles of limited cardinality. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]: Distributed Artificial Intelligence—Multiagent systems; J.4 [Social and Behavioral Sciences]: Economics; K.4.4 [Computers and Society]: Electronic Commerce General Terms Economics, Theory Keywords Multiagent resource allocation, Negotiation, Social choice and welfare, Utility theory

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Yann Chevaleyre, Ulle Endriss, Jérôme Lang, Nicolas Maudet
• Keywords: ATAL 2005, Multiagent Resource Allocation, Optimal Allocation, So-called Kseparable Domains