On Integrating Time-Preference and Concession Models Into Cloud Computing Negotiations

Abstract

Cloud computing offers information technology resources like infrastructure, platform and software in the form of on-demand services. Adoption of cloud yields several benefits to the consumer and these benefits could be realized to their fullest potential in a market based mechanism. At present, commercial marketplaces for cloud-based services are in their infancy. Nevertheless, we are gradually moving towards marketplaces like Amazon AWS. In future, electronic agents would negotiate on the behalf of consumers in procuring a service from cloud markets. In negotiating a cloud-service, the agents should be capable of representing their principals' preferences. These preferences help the agents to improve the outcome of a negotiation. The possibility of a successful outcome can be enhanced by exploiting trade-offs that are driven by preferences among multiple issues. One such preference is time preference which can modeled using time discount functions and is useful in generating price and time trade-offs. In this paper, we propose a hyperbolic discounting model based on the theory of intertemporal choice to generate price and time trade-offs. Further, we provide an algorithm to integrate hyperbolic discounting function based trade-off model with a time dependent tactic (TDT) based concession model in the negotiation process.