Exploring the Strategy Space of Negotiating Agents

This book reports on an outstanding thesis that has significantlyadvanced the state-of-the-art in the area of automated negotiation. It givesnew practical and theoretical insights into the design and evaluation ofautomated negotiators. It describes an innovative negotiating agent frameworkthat enables systematic exploration of the space of possible negotiationstrategies by recombining different agent components. Using this framework, newand effective ways are formulated for an agent to learn, bid, and accept duringa negotiation. The findings have been evaluated in four annual instantiationsof the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC), theresults of which are also outlined here. The book also describes severalmethodologies for evaluating and comparing negotiation strategies andcomponents, with a special emphasis on performance and accuracy measures.