Effective acceptance conditions in real-time automated negotiation

In every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties must accept an offer to avoid a break off. As a break off is usually an undesirable outcome for both parties, it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When designing such conditions, one is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the current offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented before time runs out. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC), we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We perform extensive experiments to compare the performance of various acceptance conditions in combination with a broad range of bidding strategies and negotiation scenarios. Furthermore we propose new acceptance conditions and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions. We also provide insight into why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation scenario and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.