Determining successful negotiation strategies: an evolutionary approach

Abstract

To be successful in open, multi-agent environments, autonomous agents must be capable of adapting their negotiation strategies and tactics to their prevailing circumstances. To this end, we present an empirical study showing the relative success of different strategies against different types of opponent in different environments. In particular we adopt an evolutionary approach in which strategies and tactics correspond to the genetic material in a genetic algorithm. We conduct a series of experiments to determine the most successful strategies and to see how and when these strategies evolve depending on the context and negotiation stance of the agent's opponent.