A Secure and Fair Protocol that Addresses Weaknesses of the Nash Bargaining Solution in Nonlinear Negotiation

Negotiation with multiple interdependent issues is an important problem since much of real-world negotiation falls into this category. This paper examines the problem that, in such domains, agent utility functions are nonlinear, and thereby can create nonconvex Pareto frontiers. This in turn implies that the Nash Bargaining Solution, which has been viewed as the gold standard for identifying a unique optimal negotiation outcome, does not serve that role in nonlinear domains. In nonlinear domains, unlike linear ones, there can be multiple Nash Bargaining Solutions, and all can be sub-optimal with respect to social welfare and fairness. In this paper, we propose a novel negotiation protocol called SFMP (the Secure and Fair Mediator Protocol) that addresses this challenge, enabling secure multilateral negotiations with fair and pareto-optimal outcomes in nonlinear domains. The protocol works by (1) using nonlinear optimization, combined with a Multi-Party protocol, to find the Pareto front without revealing agent’s private utility information, and (2) selecting the agreement from the Pareto set that maximizes a fair division criterion we call approximated fairness. We demonstrate that SFMP is able to find agreements that maximize fairness and social welfare in nonlinear domains, and out-performs (in terms of outcomes and scalability) previously developed nonlinear negotiation protocols

A baseline for non-linear bilateral negotiations: the full results of the agents competing in ANAC 2014

In the past few years, there is a growing interest in automated negotiation in which software agents facilitate negotiation on behalf of their users and try to reach joint agreements. The potential value of developing such mechanisms becomes enormous when negotiation domain is too complex for humans to find agreements (e.g. e-commerce) and when software components need to reach agreements to work together (e.g. web-service composition). Here, one of the major challenges is to design agents that are able to deal with incomplete information about their opponents in negotiation as well as to effectively negotiate on their users’ behalves. To facilitate the research in this field, an automated negotiating agent competition has been organized yearly. This paper introduces the research challenges in Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (ANAC) 2014 and explains the competition set up and results. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the best performing five agents has been examined

The challenge of negotiation in the game of Diplomacy

The game of Diplomacy has been used as a test case for complex automated negotiations for a long time, but to date very few successful negotiation algorithms have been implemented for this game. We have therefore decided to include a Diplomacy tournament within the annual Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC). In this paper we present the setup and the results of the ANAC 2017 Diplomacy Competition and the ANAC 2018 Diplomacy Challenge. We observe that none of the negotiation algorithms submitted to these two editions have been able to significantly improve the performance over a non-negotiating baseline agent. We analyze these algorithms and discuss why it is so hard to write successful negotiation algorithms for Diplomacy. Finally, we provide experimental evidence that, despite these results, coalition formation and coordination do form essential elements of the game

音楽媒体との接触に関する社会心理学的研究(Ⅱ)：音楽嗜好におよぼす独自性欲求の影響

Moroi & Itagaki (2013) examined long tail distribution model for consumer behavior proposed by Anderson(2006). The present study explored the relationships among music tastes and need for uniqueness (Snyder & Fromkin, 1977) in female undergraduates. The Purchase Experiences of Recent Japanese Popular Songs Scale developed by authors and Need for Uniqueness Scale (Miyashita, 1991) were administered to female undergraduates(N=311). Results of Spearman’s rank correlation analyses indicated that need for uniqueness facilitated downloading music files which were not popular. The effects of similarity motive(Byrne, 1971) were discussed.論

Evaluating practical negotiating agents: Results and analysis of the 2011 international competition

This paper presents an in-depth analysis and the key insights gained from the Second International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2011). ANAC is an international competition that challenges researchers to develop successful automated negotiation agents for scenarios where there is no information about the strategies and preferences of the opponents. The key objectives of this competition are to advance the state-of-the-art in the area of practical bilateral multi-issue negotiations, and to encourage the design of agents that are able to operate effectively across a variety of scenarios. Eighteen teams from seven different institutes competed. This paper describes these agents, the setup of the tournament, including the negotiation scenarios used, and the results of both the qualifying and final rounds of the tournament. We then go on to analyse the different strategies and techniques employed by the participants using two methods: (i) we classify the agents with respect to their concession behaviour against a set of standard benchmark strategies and (ii) we employ empirical game theory (EGT) to investigate the robustness of the strategies. Our analysis of the competition results allows us to highlight several interesting insights for the broader automated negotiation community. In particular, we show that the most adaptive negotiation strategies, while robu

Challenges and Main Results of the Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) 2019

The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) is a yearly-organized international contest in which participants from all over the world develop intelligent negotiating agents for a variety of negotiation problems. To facilitate the research on agent-based negotiation, the organizers introduce new research challenges every year. ANAC 2019 posed five negotiation challenges: automated negotiation with partial preferences, repeated human-agent negotiation, negotiation in supply-chain management, negotiating in the strategic game of Diplomacy, and in the Werewolf game. This paper introduces the challenges and discusses the main findings and lessons learnt per league