Now or Never: Negotiating Efficiently with Unknown or Untrusted Counterparts
What is it about?
This paper deals with bilateral negotiation processes between rational agents, focussing on bilateral negotiation processes between self-motivated competitive agents who aim at efficiently carry out multi-variable negotiations with remote untrusted parties, where privacy is a major concern and agents know nothing about their opponent. In particular, the paper defines a new protocol rule, Now or Never (NoN) which, by building on the geometric concepts of convexity and convex hull, ensures a continuous progress of the negotiation, thus neutralising malicious or inefficient opponents.
Why is it important?
The Now or Never (NoN) protocol rules can be easily embedded in virtually any framework for automated negotiation and allows an agent to derive in a finite number of steps, and independently of the behaviour of the opponent, that there is no hope to find an agreement. To be able to make such an inference, the interested agent may rely on herself only, still keeping the highest freedom in the choice of her strategy. The paper also proposes an actual NoN-compliant strategy for an automated agent and evaluates the computational feasibility of the overall approach on both random negotiation scenarios and case studies of practical size.