Facing the challenge of human-agent negotiations via effective general opponent modeling

Automated negotiation agents capable of negotiating efficiently with people must deal with the fact that people are diverse in their behavior and each individual might negotiate in a different manner. Thus, automated agents must rely on a good opponent modeling component to model their counterpart and adapt their behavior to their partner. In this paper we present the KBAgent. The KBAgent is an automated negotiator that negotiates with each person only once, and uses past negotiation sessions of others as a knowledge base for general opponent modeling. The database is used to extract the likelihood of acceptance and proposals that may be offered by the opposite side. Experiments conducted with people show that the KBAgent negotiates efficiently with people and even achieves better utility values than another automated negotiator, shown to be efficient in negotiations with people. Moreover, the KBAgent achieves significantly better agreements, in terms of individual utility, than the human counterparts playing the same role. Copyright © 2009, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.