Browsing by Author "Jonker, C. M."

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14

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The 13th international automated negotiating agent competition challenges and results
(Springer, 2023) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Baarslag, T.; Fujita, K.; Hoos, H. H.; Jonker, C. M.; Mohammad, Y.; Renting, B. M.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
An international competition for negotiating agents has been organized for years to facilitate research in agent-based negotiation and to encourage the design of negotiating agents that can operate in various scenarios. The 13th International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2022) was held in conjunction with IJCAI2022. In ANAC2022, we had two leagues: Automated Negotiation League (ANL) and Supply Chain Management League (SCML). For the ANL, the participants designed a negotiation agent that can learn from the previous bilateral negotiation sessions it was involved in. In contrast, the research challenge was to make the right decisions to maximize the overall profit in a supply chain environment, such as determining with whom and when to negotiate. This chapter describes the overview of ANL and SCML in ANAC2022, and reports the results of each league, respectively.
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Alternating offers protocols for multilateral negotiation
(Springer International Publishing, 2017) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Festen, D.; Hindriks, K. V.; Jonker, C. M.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
This paper presents a general framework for multilateral turn-taking protocols and two fully specified protocols namely Stacked Alternating Offers Protocol (SAOP) and Alternating Multiple Offers Protocol (AMOP). In SAOP, agents can make a bid, accept the most recent bid or walk way (i.e., end the negotiation without an agreement) when it is their turn. AMOP has two different phases: bidding and voting. The agents make their bid in the bidding phase and vote the underlying bids in the voting phase. Unlike SAOP, AMOP does not support walking away option. In both protocols, negotiation ends when the negotiating agents reach a joint agreement or some deadline criterion applies. The protocols have been evaluated empirically, showing that SAOP outperforms AMOP with the same type of conceder agents in a time-based deadline setting. SAOP was used in the ANAC 2015 competition for automated negotiating agents.
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ANAC 2017: Repeated multilateral negotiation league
(Springer, 2021) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Fujita, K.; Baarslag, T.; Jonker, C. M.; Ito, T.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) is annually organized competition to facilitate the research on automated negotiation. This paper presents the ANAC 2017 Repeated Multilateral Negotiation League. As human negotiators do, agents are supposed to learn from their previous negotiations and improve their negotiation skills over time. Especially, when they negotiate with the same opponent on the same domain, they can adopt their negotiation strategy according to their past experiences. They can adjust their acceptance threshold or bidding strategy accordingly. In ANAC 2017, participants aimed to develop such a negotiating agent. Accordingly, this paper describes the competition settings and results with a brief description of the winner negotiation strategies.
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ANAC 2018: Repeated multilateral negotiation league
(Springer, 2020) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Fujita, K.; Baarslag, T.; Jonker, C. M.; Ito, T.; Computer Science; Ohsawa, Y.; Yada, K.; Ito, T.; Takama, Y.; Sato-Shimokawara, E.; Abe, A.; Mori, J.; Matsumura, N.; Matsumura, N.; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
This is an extension from a selected paper from JSAI2019. There are a number of research challenges in the field of Automated Negotiation. The Ninth International Automated Negotiating Agent Competition encourages participants to develop effective negotiating agents, which can negotiate with multiple opponents more than once. This paper discusses research challenges for such negotiations as well as presenting the competition set-up and results. The results show that winner agents mostly adopt hybrid bidding strategies that take their opponents’ preferences as well as their strategy into account.
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Automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC)
(AAAI press, 2017) Jonker, C. M.; Aydoğan, Reyhan; Baarslag, T.; Fujita, K.; Ito, T.; Hindiks, K.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
The annual International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) is used by the automated negotiation research community to benchmark and evaluate its work and to challenge itself. The benchmark problems and evaluation results and the protocols and strategies developed are available to the wider research community.
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Bidding support by the pocket negotiator improves negotiation outcomes
(Springer, 2023) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Jonker, C. M.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
This paper presents the negotiation support mechanisms provided by the Pocket Negotiator (PN) and an elaborate empirical evaluation of the economic decision support (EDS) mechanisms during the bidding phase of negotiations as provided by the PN. Some of these support mechanisms are offered actively, some passively. With passive support we mean that the user only gets that support by clicking a button, whereas active support is provided without prompting. Our results show, that PN improves negotiation outcomes, counters cognitive depletion, and encourages exploration of potential outcomes. We found that the active mechanisms were used more effectively than the passive ones and, overall, the various mechanisms were not used optimally, which opens up new avenues for research. As expected, the participants with higher negotiation skills outperformed the other groups, but still they benefited from PN support. Our experimental results show that people with enough technical skills and with some basic negotiation knowledge will benefit most from PN support. Our results also show that the cognitive depletion effect is reduced by Pocket Negotiator support. The questionnaire taken after the experiment shows that overall the participants found Pocket Negotiator easy to interact with, that it made them negotiate more quickly and that it improves their outcome. Based on our findings, we recommend to 1) provide active support mechanisms (push) to nudge users to be more effective, and 2) provide support mechanisms that shield the user from mathematical complexities.
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Challenges and main results of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC) 2019
(Springer, 2020) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Baarslag, T.; Fujita, K.; Mell, J.; Gratch, J.; de Jonge, D.; Mohammad, Y.; Nakadai, S.; Morinaga, S.; Osawa, H.; Aranha, C.; Jonker, C. M.; Computer Science; Bassiliades, N.; Chalkiadakis, G.; de Jonge, D.; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) is a yearly-organized international contest in which participants from all over the world develop intelligent negotiating agents for a variety of negotiation problems. To facilitate the research on agent-based negotiation, the organizers introduce new research challenges every year. ANAC 2019 posed five negotiation challenges: automated negotiation with partial preferences, repeated human-agent negotiation, negotiation in supply-chain management, negotiating in the strategic game of Diplomacy, and in the Werewolf game. This paper introduces the challenges and discusses the main findings and lessons learnt per league.
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Deniz: A robust bidding strategy for negotiation support systems
(Springer, 2021) Jonker, C. M.; Aydoğan, Reyhan; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
This paper presents the Deniz agent that has been specifically designed to support human negotiators in their bidding. The design of Deniz is done with the criteria of robustness and the availability of small data, due to a small number of negotiation rounds in mind. Deniz’s bidding strategy is based on an existing optimal concession strategy that concedes in relation to the expected duration of the negotiation. This accounts for the small data and small number of rounds. Deniz deploys an adaptive behavior-based mechanism to make it robust against exploitation. We tested Deniz against typical bidding strategies and against human negotiators. Our evaluation shows that Deniz is robust against exploitation and gains statistically significant higher utilities than human test subjects, even though it is not designed specifically to get the highest utility against humans.
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An introduction to the pocket negotiator: a general purpose negotiation support system
(Springer International Publishing, 2017) Jonker, C. M.; Aydoğan, Reyhan; Baarslag, T.; Broekens, j.; Detweiler, C. A.; Hindriks, K. V.; Huldtgren, A.; Pasman, W.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
The Pocket Negotiator (PN) is a negotiation support system developed at TU Delft as a tool for supporting people in bilateral negotiations over multi-issue negotiation problems in arbitrary domains. Users are supported in setting their preferences, estimating those of their opponent, during the bidding phase and sealing the deal. We describe the overall architecture, the essentials of the underlying techniques, the form that support takes during the negotiation phases, and we share evidence of the effectiveness of the Pocket Negotiator.
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The likeability-success tradeoff: results of the 2nd annual human-agent automated negotiating agents competition
(IEEE, 2019) Mell, J.; Gratch, J.; Aydoğan, Reyhan; Baarslag, T.; Jonker, C. M.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
We present the results of the 2nd Annual Human-Agent League of the Automated Negotiating Agent Competition. Building on the success of the previous year's results, a new challenge was issued that focused exploring the likeability-success tradeoff in negotiations. By examining a series of repeated negotiations, actions may affect the relationship between automated negotiating agents and their human competitors over time. The results presented herein support a more complex view of human-agent negotiation and capture of integrative potential (win-win solutions). We show that, although likeability is generally seen as a tradeoff to winning, agents are able to remain well-liked while winning if integrative potential is not discovered in a given negotiation. The results indicate that the top-performing agent in this competition took advantage of this loophole by engaging in favor exchange across negotiations (cross-game logrolling). These exploratory results provide information about the effects of different submitted "black-box" agents in humanagent negotiation and provide a state-of-the-art benchmark for human-agent design.
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A machine learning approach for mechanism selection in complex negotiations
(Springer Nature, 2018-04) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Marsa-Maestre, I.; Klein, M.; Jonker, C. M.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
Automated negotiation mechanisms can be helpful in contexts where users want to reach mutually satisfactory agreements about issues of shared interest, especially for complex problems with many interdependent issues. A variety of automated negotiation mechanisms have been proposed in the literature. The effectiveness of those mechanisms, however, may depend on the characteristics of the underlying negotiation problem (e.g. on the complexity of participant’s utility functions, as well as the degree of conflict between participants). While one mechanism may be a good choice for a negotiation problem, it may be a poor choice for another. In this paper, we pursue the problem of selecting the most effective negotiation mechanism given a particular problem by (1) defining a set of scenario metrics to capture the relevant features of negotiation problems, (2) evaluating the performance of a range of negotiation mechanisms on a diverse test suite of negotiation scenarios, (3) applying machine learning techniques to identify which mechanisms work best with which scenarios, and (4) demonstrating that using these classification rules for mechanism selection enables significantly better negotiation performance than any single mechanism alone.
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Nova: Value-based negotiation of norms
(ACM, 2021-08-01) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Kafali, Ö.; Jonker, C. M.; Singh, M. P.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan; Arslan, Furkan
Specifying a normative multiagent system (nMAS) is challenging, because different agents often have conflicting requirements. Whereas existing approaches can resolve clear-cut conflicts, tradeoffs might occur in practice among alternative nMAS specifications with no apparent resolution. To produce an nMAS specification that is acceptable to each agent, we model the specification process as a negotiation over a set of norms. We propose an agent-based negotiation framework, where agents’ requirements are represented as values (e.g., patient safety, privacy, and national security), and an agent revises the nMAS specification to promote its values by executing a set of norm revision rules that incorporate ontology-based reasoning. To demonstrate that our framework supports creating a transparent and accountable nMAS specification, we conduct an experiment with human participants who negotiate against our agent. Our findings show that our negotiation agent reaches better agreements (with small p-value and large effect size) faster than a baseline strategy. Moreover, participants perceive that our agent enables more collaborative and transparent negotiations than the baseline (with small p-value and large effect size in particular settings) toward reaching an agreement.
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Results of the first annual human-agent league of the automated negotiating agents competition
(The ACM Digital Library, 2018) Mell, J.; Gratch, J.; Baarslag, T.; Aydoğan, Reyhan; Jonker, C. M.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
We present the results of the first annual Human-Agent League of ANAC. By introducing a new human-agent negotiating platform to the research community at large, we facilitated new advancements in human-aware agents. This has succeeded in pushing the envelope in agent design, and creating a corpus of useful human-agent interaction data. Our results indicate a variety of agents were submitted, and that their varying strategies had distinct outcomes on many measures of the negotiation. These agents approach the problems endemic to human negotiation, including user modeling, bidding strategy, rapport techniques, and strategic bargaining. Some agents employed advanced tactics in information gathering or emotional displays and gained more points than their opponents, while others were considered more “likeable” by their partners.
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A survey of decision support mechanisms for negotiation
(Springer, 2023) Aydoğan, Reyhan; Jonker, C. M.; Computer Science; AYDOĞAN, Reyhan
This paper introduces a dependency analysis and a categorization of conceptualized and existing economic decision support mechanisms for negotiation. The focus of our survey is on economic decision support mechanisms, although some behavioural support mechanisms were included, to recognize the important work in that area. We categorize support mechanisms from four different aspects: (i) economic versus behavioral decision support, (ii) analytical versus strategical support, (iii) active versus passive support and (iv) implicit versus explicit support. Our survey suggests that active mechanisms would be more effective than passive ones, and that implicit mechanisms can shield the user from mathematical complexities. Furthermore, we provide a list of existing economic support mechanisms.