TY - GEN
T1 - Optimal non-adaptive concession strategies with incomplete information
AU - Baarslag, Tim
AU - Hadfi, Rafik
AU - Hindriks, Koen
AU - Ito, Takayuki
AU - Jonker, Catholijn
PY - 2016/1/1
Y1 - 2016/1/1
N2 - When two parties conduct a negotiation, they must be willing to make concessions to achieve a mutually acceptable deal, or face the consequences of no agreement. Therefore, negotiators normally make larger concessions as the deadline is closing in. Many time-based concession strategies have already been proposed, but they are typically heuristic in nature, and therefore, it is still unclear what is the right way to concede toward the opponent. Our aim is to construct optimal concession strategies against specific classes of acceptance strategies. We apply sequential decision techniques to find analytical solutions that optimize the expected utility of the bidder, given certain strategy sets of the opponent. Our solutions turn out to significantly outperform current state of the art approaches in terms of obtained utility. Our results open the way for a new and general concession strategy that can be combined with various existing learning and accepting techniques to yield a fully-fledged negotiation strategy for the alternating offers setting.
AB - When two parties conduct a negotiation, they must be willing to make concessions to achieve a mutually acceptable deal, or face the consequences of no agreement. Therefore, negotiators normally make larger concessions as the deadline is closing in. Many time-based concession strategies have already been proposed, but they are typically heuristic in nature, and therefore, it is still unclear what is the right way to concede toward the opponent. Our aim is to construct optimal concession strategies against specific classes of acceptance strategies. We apply sequential decision techniques to find analytical solutions that optimize the expected utility of the bidder, given certain strategy sets of the opponent. Our solutions turn out to significantly outperform current state of the art approaches in terms of obtained utility. Our results open the way for a new and general concession strategy that can be combined with various existing learning and accepting techniques to yield a fully-fledged negotiation strategy for the alternating offers setting.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84962206808&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-30307-9_3
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-30307-9_3
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84962206808
SN - 9783319303055
T3 - Studies in Computational Intelligence
SP - 39
EP - 54
BT - Recent Advances in Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiation
A2 - Fujita, Katsuhide
A2 - Robu, Valentin
A2 - Fukuta, Naoki
A2 - Zhang, Minjie
A2 - Ito, Takayuki
PB - Springer/Verlag
T2 - 7th International Workshop on Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiation, ACAN 2014
Y2 - 1 May 2014
ER -