Deniz: A robust bidding strategy for negotiation support systems

Abstract

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.