Negotiations with inaccurate payoff values

Abstract

We have developed a new method for negotiation with inaccurate payoff values. It is difficult to know accurate payoff values because the available resources of each agent are limited. The inaccuracy of payoff values can cause negotiation failure. However, if the agents know the correct values, they can reach an agreement. Advising, i.e. giving self-estimation values to the other agent, is one way to recover from a negotiation failure. Simple methods for incorporating advice into evaluation, such as by arithmetic mean, do not work well because the advisee may seriously suffer from deception. In order to overcome this drawback, we propose a method that incorporates advice into evaluation. This method is based on similarity between the adviser's estimation and the advisee's estimation. Our method is efficient and can suppress deception fairly well so agents are motivated to adopt this method. Our experiments use example problems, and the results show that our method is efficient and gives an incentive to adopt itself.