Bargaining Chips: Coordinating one-to-many concurrent composite negotiations

This study presents Bargaining Chips: a framework for one-to-many concurrent composite negotiations, where multiple deals can be reached and combined. Our framework is designed to mirror the salient aspects of real-life procurement and trading scenarios, in which a buyer seeks to acquire a number of items from different sellers at the same time. To do so, the buyer needs to successfully perform multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations as well as coordinate the composite outcome resulting from each interdependent negotiation. This paper contributes to the state of the art by: (1) presenting a model and test-bed for addressing such challenges; (2) by proposing a new, asynchronous interaction protocol for coordinating concurrent negotiation threads; and (3) by providing classes of multi-deal coordinators that are able to navigate this new one-to-many multi-deal setting. We show that Bargaining Chips can be used to evaluate general asynchronous negotiation and coordination strategies in a setting that generalizes over a number of existing negotiation approaches

A Simple Semi-Dynamic Cooperative Bargaining Approach

The area of bargaining mechanisms has been well explored in both multi-agent systems and economics. In bargaining, participants raise/reduce their offers until an agreement is hopefully reached. In this dynamic environment, finding superior agreements without having the knowledge about the strategic private information of the counterpart is considerable. In this paper, we present a simple semi-dynamic cooperative bargaining, which deals with bargaining of single-buyer and single-seller in a multi-criteria single-good e-Marketplace. Both buyer and seller are equipped with medial agents that cooperatively want to win bargaining via a slight maneuver, over their own preferences that are unknown to each other. We show the results obtained using the simulation. This approach shows that the lack of intersection between threshold utility intervals of both parties does not necessarily yield a disagreement. On the other hand, if the party whose utility threshold is lower than the utility threshold of the other party makes the initial offer, the two parties will certainly have an agreement in a single round

Human Attributes in the Modelling of Work Teams

International audienceThis paper presents a summary of relevant research findings that have been used as the theoretical background in the design of an agent-based model to simulate the human behaviour within work teams (the TEAKS model). It underlines some of the main trends in the modelling of human behaviour in teams, and the rationale for selecting the attributes to represent real team candidates as software agents in the TEAKS model