Reaching Unanimous Agreements Within Agent-Based Negotiation Teams With Linear and Monotonic Utility Functions
This work addresses coordination challenges in multi-agent systems for negotiation teams, but it is incremental as it builds on existing mediation and utility-based approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of ensuring unanimous agreements within agent-based negotiation teams by introducing a model with a trusted mediator that guarantees each team member's utility meets or exceeds their aspiration levels at every round, resulting in robust decision-making against manipulations.
In this article, an agent-based negotiation model for negotiation teams that negotiate a deal with an opponent is presented. Agent-based negotiation teams are groups of agents that join together as a single negotiation party because they share an interest that is related to the negotiation process. The model relies on a trusted mediator that coordinates and helps team members in the decisions that they have to take during the negotiation process: which offer is sent to the opponent, and whether the offers received from the opponent are accepted. The main strength of the proposed negotiation model is the fact that it guarantees unanimity within team decisions since decisions report a utility to team members that is greater than or equal to their aspiration levels at each negotiation round. This work analyzes how unanimous decisions are taken within the team and the robustness of the model against different types of manipulations. An empirical evaluation is also performed to study the impact of the different parameters of the model.