Abstract
In the previous chapter we presented an empirical method to classify agents into four broad categories of concession behavior, and we formulated guidelines on how agents should bid against each category. This chapter follows an alternative approach by devising optimal concession strategies against specific classes of acceptance strategies. 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. We provide a theoretical model in which a bidder makes a series of offers to an acceptor with unknown preferences. We apply sequential decision techniques as we did in Chap. 5, but this time to find analytical solutions that optimize the expected utility of the bidder, given certain strategy sets of the opponent. We then compare our solution to state of the art concession techniques in a negotiation simulation. Our solutions turn out to significantly outperform current 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.
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This chapter is based on the following publications: [16]
Tim Baarslag, Rafik Hadfi, Koen V. Hindriks, Takayuki Ito, and Catholijn M. Jonker. Optimal non-adaptive concession strategies with incomplete information. In Proceedings of The Seventh International Workshop on Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiations (ACAN 2014), 2014
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Baarslag, T. (2016). Optimal Non-adaptive Concession Strategies. In: Exploring the Strategy Space of Negotiating Agents. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28243-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28243-5_9
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